I’m simul-watching the Olympics now, just after Bode Miller raced his downhill, seeking peace and satisfaction. He’s 32, and has been doing top level ski racing for over a decade. He lost by 0.09 (0.02 from second) of a second, faster than the blink of an eye. “It was fun, it was tough,” he said afterwards. As I’m writing, I’m waiting to see if his time holds up for a bronze medal.
As I play through life, I collect more and more sports, personally, or vicariously, I can follow and understand in the Olympics. By the time I was twelve, I was competing in both swimming and figure skating. I was really terrible at each, but I still loved trying as hard as I could. I mean, when my sister and I did our one and only ice dance competition, we finished 12th out of 12 pairs. And I never did win a race swimming; I have a huge collection of second place ribbons, and some thirds from that era – a whole lot of red and white, but no blue.
Then in my late teens, I started skiing, and added another sport I could follow with some inner visualization. Cross-country, downhill, slalom, bumps – I’ve done them all, and think I’m pretty good, but nothing like the folks I see here tonight. Speed skating, I could feel that too, and now running and cycling as well, to say nothing of triathlon. Annie’s snowboarding and kayaking fils out my dance card, and makes it all but impossible to watch everything I think I should in any given Olympics.
I don’t know what’s more amazing, watching the best of the best doing things I know how to do, have tried to do at an intense level, or watching a sport I have no clue about like, say, luge. When I see someone rocket down the ice tube, getting up to 90 mph, I try to figure out just what is making the difference between the fast guys and the also rans. The color commenter tells me about weight shifts and shoulder pressure, sled shape and foot position. He might as well be talking Mongolian – I can intellectually understand it, but I can not feel it inside, and that makes all the difference.
When I watch a sport I do myself, I sense internally the body positioning, the physical actions, and fully comprehend just how insanely hard it is to do what they’re doing. I have a higher level of appreciation, as well as understanding, for the runners, the bikers, the skiers, the swimmers, the boarders. I can actually imagine myself doing what they are doing.
When I see an X-C skier collapse at the end of a 15 km race, chest heaving, steaming on the snow, I’ve felt that myself at the end of a 5 or 10 K race. The first few moments carry that sense of “Put a gun to my head, tell me to run, and I still won’t take another step.” Some races, they want the perforated strip off your bib number to keep track of who finishes when. In the tiny corner of my mind still functioning, when a volunteer asks, “Can I have the bottom tag?”, I laugh. I’m standing there, hands on knees, trying not to pass out, unable to move, and they want ME to remove the tag? I can’t talk, much less stand up straight, so I just hunker there, waiting for them to understand that if they want that tag so much, they’ll just have to go after it themselves.
When I watch a downhiller careen around a gate, flying low over the snow, arms flailing backwards, trying so hard to pull his weight forward again, I know the desperation riveting in his mind. If the stomach muscles don’t make the correction, don’t get that center of gravity back over the skis where it belongs, then all is lost. And it’s either go flying down to one side, creaming a hip, or over-correcting and flying forward on the hands and arms, maybe tearing a rotator cuff. No good options short of success: get upright again, or sheer terror and pain await.
Forty years ago, I read a brief phrase, in an article by Tim Cahill about Mark Spitz, defining the “athletic virtues of speed, grace, and reckless courage.” The Winter Olympics make very clear that all three are needed to reach the highest steps on the podium. Most of these sports are fast, much faster than walking or running. Many are performed on the thinnest of edges, along a manicured frozen glaze of ice. Everyone here can go fast; many perform with amazing grace. But only those who add the life and soul risking element of recklessness, and translate it into courage, ignoring humility, have a chance to reach the top. It’s what most separates those of us who are merely fast, or just graceful, from those who are willing to lose everything to win.