By Brett Yates
posted
Aug 15, 2012
Well, we beat China: more total medals and, crucially, more
golds. It's a surprise to me, given that China defeated us pretty
brutally in the latter category in 2008, and I sort of assumed that
its recent commitment to athletic supremacy would bear more and
more fruit as the nation's new generation of athletes, handpicked
in childhood, came of age.
One thing I forgot to account for, I guess, is the somewhat
inexplicable (to me) spike in Olympic success that almost always
occurs for a host country: for example, at Vancouver in 2010,
Canada literally doubled its Turin gold medal count. So it's only
naturally that, after Beijing, London would be a letdown for
China.
Does Team USA's triumph on neutral ground mean that the United
States is, in fact, a more athletic nation than China? That must be
the question we're all asking, since we were so interested in NBC's
medal table: are we stronger, faster, tougher, better? The short
answers are 1) I dunno, and 2) Who cares? I'll elaborate on these
points in a moment.
In the meantime, as we celebrate, it's worth looking at a
medals-per-capita table, if you can find one: once you account for
our population advantage over most nations, the USA doesn't look
that great - we're a middle-of-the-pack country, actually, though
far ahead of China. It took several million of us to produce each
of our gold medals; whereas it took about 110,000 Grenadians to get
one.
If we accept that the Summer Olympics are the best measure of a
nation's athleticism (a country's success in the Winter Olympics
basically only gauges how cold and weird it is), then the most
athletic nation in the world has in recent years probably been
Jamaica. If not for Kirani James (the sprinter who just won
Grenada's first ever Olympic medal), then Jamaica would be ranked
first in London in medals per capita and medals by GDP.
It's not just Usain Bolt: Jamaica has ranked in the top ten in
medals per capita in every Summer Olympics but one since 1976. (The
least athletic nation in the world is apparently India, routinely
dead last in medals per capita, having racked up only 24 in total
since its first Games in 1900.)
Of course, these statistical measurements aren't flawless: a
single random blip of greatness (like Kirani James) is enough to
shoot a very small nation to the top of the charts, and the numbers
don't take note of Jamaica's apparent inability to perform any
athletic feat except sprinting (which it does very well). And of
course these stats still don't measure a nation's athleticism,
really; they measure the frequency with which great athletes pop up
among a nation's populace, but these great athletes may not be at
all representative of the nation's athletic prowess on the whole.
If every American swam 100 meters and we averaged the times, we
might learn something about the U.S., but I'm not sure Michael
Phelps has anything to do with you or me.
Then again, if our Olympians don't represent us, then what do
they represent? They can't just represent themselves - i.e.,
freakishly dedicated strangers committed to becoming perfect at
some useless task - because, if that were the case, nobody would
want to watch them. Of course, people are, in fact, themselves, but
here we are, looking at their achievements as though they mean
something for the rest of us.
For some reason, we've decided to celebrate the bodies of our
countrymen, and we're rather concerned that human bodies in some
other country might be better - yet the United States is ethnically
too diverse for anyone here to conceive of the Olympics as some
gross racial battle, as though American athletic superiority were a
biological superiority. Maybe our athletes are supposed to
represent the inner character of Americans (brave, dogged,
ambitious), those national traits bestowed upon us by the land, the
culture, whatever. But, wow, that sounds dumb.
Another possibility: maybe Olympians are supposed to represent
the might of their nations, not of their nations' peoples - i.e.,
we won more medals because the USA is richer and better organized
and can afford to build better athletic facilities, and a lot of
people want to live here, and our economy provides us with good
jobs that allow us enough free time to pursue excellence in skeet
shooting. America works, and the Olympics proves it - not just to
the world, but to us.
This position at least sort of makes sense, but it doesn't
conform to the patterns of sports fandom. It would be like rooting
for your favorite NBA team to win the championship because, if they
did, it would prove the superiority of the front office. In
athletics, we're never really cheering for the system that produces
the success; we cheer for the athletes - who represent something,
but it isn't economic structures.
It's no mystery why we love athletes: their accomplishments are
inspiring, their stories compelling. The mystery is why we cheer
specifically for American athletes and against foreign ones, whose
stories presumably are just as good. An irony: I root against China
intensely due to the culture of its Olympic team, which comes
across more as a government-organized work of nationalistic
propaganda than as a collection of privately motivated individuals
- which has, in turn, made me less concerned about our athletes
individually and more attentive to the U.S. medal count (in short,
more nationalistic).
Am I a xenophobe? No. But watching sports is like watching
theater: as the audience, we must maintain the fiction that the
events on stage really matter - that the guy playing the villain is
not just an actor, same as the hero. In sports, this fiction
involves picking a side - Yankees, Red Sox, Team USA - and then
pretending that the other side is evil and must be defeated.
Without this bit of make-believe, there's really no suspense. What
we actually care about is entertainment.
Tagged:
Olympics, Importance
