The 29th Olympiad

A Never-Ending Story

I am an Olympics junkie.

Normally I am utterly apathetic towards sports; I don’t seriously follow or watch any major professional or college sports. But every four years (and to a lesser extent, every two years in between) you’ll find me glued to the television screen. And not just for the big ticket events, like China versus the United States in basketball, or the thrilling races at the Water Cube. No, tell me that Hungary is facing off against Brazil in women’s handball, or that Colombia is contesting China for the men’s 62kg weightlifting gold, and I’ll tune in. By the closing ceremonies, I’ll probably have watched more than 150 hours of Olympic coverage.

So why do I love the Olympics? Because I love stories. The “human interest stories” that networks like NBC use to tie the Games together are often derided as overblown, self-promoting fluff; and on one level, they are. But we need them, too: without the people, the sports are nothing but motion and numbers. You need a narrative.

The Olympics is a perfect example of a complex narrative. Simple narratives contain very little substance beyond what’s on the surface; everything intrinsic to them can be grasped and apprehended almost immediately. Like a snow globe, the entire narrative is contained inside a tiny space, and once you process it fully, that thing holds very little allure or staying power.

Complex narratives are the opposite—take that snow globe, shatter it on the floor, and have a guy whisper, “Rosebud,” in your ear. Now we’re talking. Complex narratives refuse to be fully appreciated with a cursory glance; rather than laying everything out and revealing everything at once, they hint at the infinite possibilities that lie outside their boundaries. They are not encapsulated, but are directly connected to a living, breathing world. This condition is what makes shows such as The Wire and Mad Men compelling as narratives, and it is this condition that makes the Olympics scintillating as a narrative.

The Olympics is like a fractal: there’s always a finer pattern to appreciate the deeper you look. At the highest level, the Olympics is “about” hundreds of nations coming together to celebrate the ideals of athleticism and international harmony; the tension comes from very real political concerns within and between nations that filter into this atmosphere of supposedly-pure sporting competition. US-China relations are the most obvious talking point, and of the most interest to this blog; I’ll discuss in detail a bit later. But also of interest is Russian and Georgian competition on the field while a state of war exists between the two nations; the two Koreas failing to march together in the opening ceremonies; and the troubled journey of the Iraqi delegation to these games. The list goes on.

Zoom in closer, past the level of national concerns and the sports being contested, all the way down to level of the athletes themselves. There are a multiplicity of stories here too. Take, for example, Kateřina Emmons, who won the first gold medal of the Beijing games for the Czechs. In 2004, her name was Kateřina Kůrková, and during the Athens Olympics she was invited to be a commentator for the men’s 50m rifle competition after winning her own bronze medal earlier in the week. In that event, the favorite was American Matthew Emmons, who had a commanding lead by the very end; even a mediocre final shot would be enough for his second gold. He had an excellent shot — on the wrong target — and plummeted to eighth place.

Afterwards, Matthew gave Kateřina a post-event interview; they met later at a beer garden. They hit it off almost immediately, and married in 2007. Now the husband and wife are competing (for different countries) at the 2008 Games — that’s an international meet-cute that Hollywood screenwriters would kill for. (Another wrinkle to her story: the women’s 10m air rifle was scheduled as the very first event of the Beijing Games because it was perceived to be an easy win for the Chinese defending champion, Du Li. Instead, she placed fifth and Kateřina took the gold.)

These kinds of stories are endemic to the Olympics not only because of the sheer number of competitors, but because of the intermingling of those competitors from almost every country and every walk of life. Sure, there are the stories of the professional sportsmen (The “Redeem Team” and Federer-Nadal come to mind), but as some of NBC’s $1 billion worth of ads remind me, a fair number of these world-class athletes will be flying back home to their jobs at Home Depot and the like. The somewhat-condescending ideal of amateurism espoused by IOC founder Pierre de Coubertin may be dead, but the story of the everyman/everywoman striving for the pinnacle of athletic achievement is still an appealing one. And even with the deluge of Olympic coverage, it’s impossible to fully see all the stories.

So you have to pick and choose the best of them. For the narrative to work, the pieces have to be there in the first place; then you put them together. And one of the key pieces is often nationalism — the pride and honor of your country is at stake, after all! Sporting events like these are the last places where it is socially acceptable to hope and fervently pray that your country utterly destroys the rest of the world. And international competition makes for a great narrative… sometimes.

An example of an abortive “story” is in swimming, with the 400m women’s freestyle. NBC Sports even had a flashy pre-event video package explaining the gravity of the situation: French swimmer Laure Manaudou was defending her world record against Italian favorite Federica Pellegrini — and Pellgrini was the current girlfriend of Manaudou’s ex, who had posted nude photos of Manaudou on the internet! Truly soap-operatic stuff; unfortunately the story floundered when Pellegrini finished a disappointing fifth and Manaudou posted even worse at eighth. There might have been a story there if American Katie Hoff, who was not predicted to win the event, had snagged the gold. However, after a strong surge she barely lost to British swimmer Rebecca Adlington. Great story for the Brits; not so much for the US.

No, the real story was in the men’s 4×100m freestyle relay, an event which has made plenty of American newspapers and has been replayed, commented, and analyzed more than a dozen times in the past 24 hours by NBC’s Olympic coverage. Really, all the pieces are there:

• Scrappy underdog heroes: This event was dominated by the Americans since its introduction in 1964 — until they placed 2nd in the 2000 Sydney Olympics. They fared even worse in 2004, getting the bronze.
• Dastardly villains: It is very easy for Americans to deride the French. Alain Bernard’s offhand comment that they would smash the Americans only added fuel to the flames.
• High stakes: This event was tied to another of the big American stories of the Games — Michael Phelps’s quest for eight gold medals. A loss here could have easily derailed those ambitions.
• Escalation: This event showed every swimmer giving it their all. Even the fifth-place finishers from Sweden broke the pre-Beijing world record in this event.
• Come-from-behind victory: As expected, the French seemed poised to win the event. Then Jason Lezak closed at the gap, and at the last second… America got their story.

These kinds of events crystallize the Games into a compelling narrative. But something as big and expansive as the 29th Olympiad needs more than this one story; it needs many more. So what’s the next story?

All signs point to women’s gymnastics between the US and China, at least the way NBC and the media are shaping the story. Between covering synchronized diving and the qualifiers for women’s gymnastics, NBC Sports showed a couple of interesting pieces. The first of these was a package investigating the Chinese tradition of acrobatics and acrobatics training. While ostensibly the piece was designed to give American viewers a greater understanding of Chinese culture, it’s easy to see how this can feed the nationalistic fire: either it can be used as an excuse for why America loses at events like gymnastics and diving (”They’ve been doing this for a thousand years!”) or as something to make the victory sweeter (”They’ve been doing this for a thousand years — and we still beat them!”).

The second piece of note was an interview between Bob Costas and President George W. Bush. For an interview during sports-related programming, Costas’ questions were unusually aggressive and political, including such gems of questions as: “…This remains an authoritarian state… with an abysmal human rights record. In the long run, is China’s rise irreconcilable with America’s interest?” and “If these Olympics are as successful as they are shaping up to be, most people believe this only further legitimizes the ruling party in the minds of most Chinese citizens…” The placement of such hard-hitting political content before showing the Chinese and US qualifiers in gymnastics could not have been accidental.

For a number of reasons, this gymnastics event could prove to be a powder keg. Journalists and commentators, including Bela Karolyi, coach of the gold-winning 1996 American woman gymnasts, are already hammering on issues such as the uncertain age of the Chinese gymnasts and complications with the new judging and scoring system. This, coupled with the flubs and injuries plaguing the American team, are at least setting up for a dramatic story…

I pose a question to those on the other side of the Pacific: How is the narrative of these games shaping up over there? What stories are crystallizing with the Chinese coverage of these games? The contrasts — and similarities — could prove to be illuminating.

© 2008 The Hypermodern.