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Rio brought out the best in athletes like Singapore's Joseph Schooling, but not from local organizers.
Gabriel Bouys AFP
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On my flight home from Rio, I got to thinking about a lesson I learned in freshman English at Kent State and its connection to the Rio Games.
Back in the fall of 2000, I finished a well-argued, well-written four-page essay about five minutes before class. At that point, I realized I owned no printer paper. My solution: I printed it on the back side of a crumpled, food-stained course syllabus.
Problem solved, right? Professor Lewis Fried did not think so. “This is unworthy of my class, and unworthy of your name,” he wrote. He saw academics as something more than an exercise in functionality, and however adequate — strong, even — my writing was, the pursuit was a noble one that demanded more than my sloppy, stained presentation.
Which brings us to Rio 2016. What a remarkable experience. Even as a lifelong sports fan, I wasn’t prepared for the explosion of sports greatness around me at my first Olympics. Every day, at every venue, brought new moments of glory big and small from the nearly 11,000 athletes there.
I’m not just talking about Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, Simone Biles or Neymar.
I was there when Singapore’s Joseph Schooling shocked the world by beating Phelps in the 100m butterfly, winning his country’s first gold medal. His national anthem, an unfamiliar tune to an American, stirred in me passions I thought only “The Star-Spangled Banner” could. Nine other countries won their first gold in Rio, and I imagine it was the same for all of them.
That same night, American Anthony Ervin won a gold medal 16 years after his first one. When he jumped into the crowd to hug his family, my reportorial cynicism evaporated in his contagious joy. During late nights at the main press center, I watched with fascination as correspondents from small, obscure countries called home to record radio interviews. They spoke on behalf of an entire nation.
That’s what the Olympics does: It compels the entire world to bring out their best. We don’t usually get opportunities to present our personal and national best on the world stage in a positive way. Reporters, sponsors, national team staff and volunteers all spoke of the long hours with a certain amount of obligation. We’re not working 16-hour days at the Olympics because we want to; we work those hours because it’s that important.
This is exactly why it was so frustrating and disappointing to see all of the Olympics’ logistical and organizational failures. In private conversations, many people shared some version of the same, mournful sentiment: Rio could have been so much more than it was.
A common epithet for Rio 2016 is that the “athletes carried the day,” making up for organizational problems.
From a fan’s perspective, that’s true. The sports were everything we hoped. But I don’t think it’s quite so simple. What the athletes really did was prove why it’s appropriate to expect nothing but the very best of the IOC and its local host committees — these wonderful athletes brought their very best, so why can’t the organizers?
Time and time again, things went wrong. Bus drivers went the wrong way, or gave bad information about where to go. Volunteers kept quitting, and their replacements didn’t know the venues. Even IOC members, treated like royalty in host cities, were hours late to meetings. The diving pool turned green. Venues ran out of food and didn’t tell anyone until you’d spent 20 minutes in line. In a 17-day event, multilingual wayfinding signs at Olympic Park finally went up around Day 7 or 8. A camera fell into the Olympic Park.
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| The diving pool turning green was just one of many problems in Rio during the Games' 17 days. |
Rio 2016’s defenders are right to note the economic and political problems there, and in many ways, Brazil outperformed low expectations and got the job done. Nothing catastrophically failed.
But like Professor Fried taught me, sometimes it’s not enough to merely get the job done. Olympic veterans told me, with a wistful look in their eyes, about how wonderful Beijing and London were, when the organizers made the Games feel like more than just the sum of 41 world championships. All too often in Rio, it felt like we were getting by on just the bare minimum.
South African Wayde van Niekerk didn’t just barely get the job done. The U.S. women’s rowing 8 didn’t just get the job done. Surely, Brazilian judo gold medalist Rafaela Silva, who grew up in the infamous City of God favela before becoming a national hero, didn’t just get the job done.
Honor, pride and dignity demand our absolute best, and Rio all too often felt like that crumbled essay I turned in as a freshman. I hope to experience more of the Olympics at its very best next time.
