I have now been watching the Winter Olympics for over a week and I could not be happier with what I have seen. I believe this puts me in the minority of the American viewing public.
Everywhere I go people are complaining about how poorly the U.S. is doing in these games. “We are not even going to place,” said a friend of mine. I, on the other hand, could care less about the final medal count. What matters to me is the individual moments of greatness that occur, and could only occur in the Olympics.
I know that Bode didn’t win a medal and I am happy about it. Not because he was the most over-hyped American athlete in these games but because if he had won it would have been expected. The fact that he failed to place and was also disqualified opened a window for other Olympians to do something great. Ted Ligety, Bode’s teammate, filled that window and took home gold.
This is a true Olympic story: the athlete no one could stop talking about against the athlete who no one had ever talked about.
If you Google “Bode Miller Fails” you will get roughly 100,000 results that fit that search term. So was that what he did? Did he fail? Bode Miller has raced thousands of times in his career but in the Olympics when the pressure was on to improve on his two silvers from the last games, he couldn’t do it.
The Olympics are all about pressure. They are all about performing in the clutch when the whole world is watching. This is especially true in the world of most of these sports where America only learns your name two weeks out of every four years. Only two weeks to perform and show the world your life’s work.
That is what the Olympics are all about, performing. Sometimes, that performance must come at a time when the expectations of you are that you will fail. The greatest triumphs always ride on the back of failure.
The greatest Winter Olympic moment of all time came in 1980 in Lake Placid. The US Men’s Hockey Team, a ragtag group of college kids, pulled together and defeated the seemingly invincible Russian squad. The reason this event is remembered is because it was an upset. No one expected the US to win, no one.
That is why the Olympics are great and that is why we watch. Watching the stories of gutter to glory occur before our eyes gives us hope. They inspire us to realize that failing should lower others expectations of us but raise our expectations of ourselves. It shows that there are no sure things in life, whether you’re a slated for last or slated for gold we must acknowledge that we could do either at any moment.
Life and the Olympics are not about what is expected; they are about breaking expectations and achieving what each individual knows they can.
