Fri, Aug 27/04
That first hurdle is a doozie

Some thoughts on the Olympics, or what little of them the CBC can squeeze in between commercials and Brian Williams jabbing his pen at me from his perch high atop Mount Olympus.

Re: Perdita Felicien

Canadians are seemingly incapable of sharing disappointment while maintaining any degree of perspective. All I saw was world champion hurdler Perdita Felicien bail on a hurdle, just like American world champion hurdler Allen Johnson did two days later. What I didn't see was the ghost of Canadian Olympic futility past claiming yet another victim. Steve Simmons saw him, though:

This seems to be our mythology, our all-too-familiar Olympic anthem of Woe Canada¹. An ever-shocking mythology in Greece of stunning disappointment, flawed heroes, inexplicable circumstances and failed dreams.

Right. It was either that, or a girl from Pickering bailing on a hurdle.

Re: The aforementioned Canadian Olympic futility

Simmons argues that the prototypical Canadian Olympic failure is the one in which our athlete was favoured to win, and that the prototypical Canadian success is the one in which our athlete comes out of nowhere. He also argues that this "always happens." He's not alone in arguing those things, but, happily, they make no sense. If the Canadian came out of nowhere, then there must necessarily have been a more heavily favoured athlete from another country who didn't pull it off; likewise, if the favoured Canadian blew it, some other nation's athlete must have pulled off a "surprise". The idea that it "always happens" is disproved by the fact that it doesn't always happen.

We Canadians are staunch internationalists until we come face to face with failure, at which point we become as insular and myopic as any nation on earth. Simmons again:

The men's eight in rowing. Emilie Heymans. Jeremy Wotherspoon. Kurt Browning. Caroline Brunet. Ken Read. Ben Johnson [Ben Johnson? –ed]. The list could read longer. All of them world champions.

If being a world champion makes you the prohibitive gold medal favourite, no matter how many thousandths of a second you won by nor how many limbs you've had amputated in the meantime, then Athens is bursting at the seams with putrid defeat. In the swimming competition, fourteen reigning world champions "failed" to win. As of the time I painstakingly researched this, four of six diving world champions had done likewise, along with nine world champion rowing crews and seven (of eleven) men's individual and team track and field world champions. With just seven medals left to give out in women's track and field, only heptathlon gold medallist Carolina Kluft had repeated a world championship. Another fourteen failures, in other words.

Simmons again: "Does this happen in other places, with athletes we may not know about or care about? Or is it only us? Is this sporting angst exclusively our own?" Short answers: 'yes', 'no' and 'probably'.

Re: Tired, fat Canadians suddenly espousing Vince Lombardi-esque attitudes towards life

Somewhere along the line it became okay for everyone to have feverish opinions on topics about which they know absolutely dick. Whether it's gymnastics judging, hurdling technique or sports psychology, pretty much everyone in Canada has a kinesiology degree these days, with a specialty in everything. "A personal best isn't good enough," a crowd of mid-level office functionaries is shouting (scroll down) across the Atlantic at the 138th ranked female archer in the world. "Bring home a medal or don't come home at all! Produce or die, like me!"

William Houston even put it to paper, accusing wrestling silver medallist Tonya Verbeek of having "mailed in her performance… in the gold-medal match against Saori Yoshida of Japan." Unlike track cycling gold medallist Lori-Ann Muenzer, he says, Verbeek was not "ready and willing to fight for gold." Big words. Advice for William Houston: a world-class wrestler might put up slightly more of a fight than the sports broadcasters at whom you make a career taking pot shots. I suggest you relay your concerns to Ms Verbeek in person. Lunch is on me.
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¹ "Woe Canada" yields 931 Google hits. Simmons' prose is as original as it is uplifting.