By Michael F. Duggan
The Summer Olympics is over. It seemed shorter this year, which is fine with me. I have always been ambivalent about the summer games. I never watch it on my own, and yet if it is on a television in a restaurant or bar, I cannot look away. If there was one thing that Jefferson and Nietzsche agree upon, it is the admiration for human excellence in all of its forms, and I concur. It is also a distraction of healthy competition in a troubled time, with “controversies” of little consequences outside of sports.
On the other hand, as a generalist, I find the idea of young lives obsessively devoted to single activities that come down to a few zero-sum moments of triumph or tragedy to be grotesque, and not infrequently a waste. Such focus to the exclusion of so much else in life is likely to cause harm. The loss to a young life in terms of opportunity costs (and later in dollars spent on psychiatrists) may be significant. I will still watch boxing and some of the daredevil sports of winter, but overall I take little interest in sports that are determined by the scoring of judges. Regarding the competitive sport of “breaking,” I will maintain a Buddha-like silence.
Of course I will not deny the pleasure of watching hard-fought competition between physical geniuses, people who can do things that I cannot, and achieving difficult success through physical prowess and training against the best opponents in the world. The problem, I suppose, is that outside of endurance, durability, longevity, and certain precision activities (e.g. diving, pitching, gymnastics), the physical exceptionality of humans is pretty mediocre. We are among the physical scrubs of the animal kingdom, and demonstrations of our physical prowess, such as they are, are among the lest interesting things about us.
Take Simone Biles: this phenom of women’s gymnastics can supposedly jump 12 feet, vertically, something that few, of the world’s other 8.1 billion people can do. And yet if she had the proportional abilities of an ordinary house cat, she would be able to leap 25-30 feet vertically. If she was a flea, she could clear the Eiffel Tower with room to spare.
And then there is swimming. The fastest swimmers in the 50 meter freestyle can move an around 5.6 mph (Michael Phelps once clocked an amazing 8.8 mph with a mono fin). By contrast an Indo-Pacific sailfish can move at speeds up to 68 mph underwater. The fastest human being can sprint to around 27.5 mph, relative to a cheetah’s bursts of 70 mph (or 10 mph slower than the underwater speed of some dolphins). A harbor seal (an animal roughly on the scale of a human) can dive to around 1,500 feet (more than 500 feet deeper than the Eiffel Tower is high) and can stay underwater for 30 minutes with no ill effects. How does unaided human performance compare to that? Even flies and gnats can do something we can’t without technology: flight. Ayuh, we’re a pretty pathetic animal, athletically speaking.
But within our limited parameters, there is also something that I call “annoying perfection.” On the one hand, the precision of platform diving is impressive to the point of disbelief (some of the dives look like they had been engineered by AU, and I still can’t figure out why some were judged higher or lower than others). On the other hand, if I saw another perfect physique (male or female) on the high board, I think I would have thrown a saltshaker at the TV set over the restaurant’s bar. And please don’t get me started about basketball, and other amateur events.
There is value in knowing the physical limits of what people can do (which might explain my youthful interest in the Guinness Book of World Records). Still, I can’t help wondering if athletics might have been more interesting during a time when sports was about naturals without all the added science and obsession.
So much of this perfection and the hair-splitting differences of new world records and sports victories of recent years come as the result of scientific training, diets, and a big-money, institutional approach to training (and today’s athletes who cheat are marginally better after taking performance-enhancing drugs, than the greats of yesteryear, some of whom used performance-hindering drugs, like alcohol [See Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle]).
There is also the ridiculous, disproportional count of medals by nation, a kind of metallic arms race, and the inspirational stories of the athletes themselves (except for Sea Biscuit, there are few things more beaten-into-the-ground than the genre of the inspirational sports story, especially if it has a slo-mo footage and a guitar or piano soundtrack). If I saw another picture of some athlete biting a gold medal, or heard another against-the-odds story about overcoming obstacles in the pursuit of excellence that make Victorian melodrama look understated… where’s that saltshaker?). The real story is that large nations with well-endowed programs seem to have an exponential advantage over small, poorer countries. This is why I find myself cheering for smaller nations rather than the ones who throw big bucks into the sports perfection business, like the U.S. and China. Cheering for a large, vastly-favored nation, sometimes feels a little like cheering for the Roman Empire (or, given the relative resources of modern world powers, perhaps the absurdity of cheering for them is its own metaphor). For the men’s 10 meter platform dive, I ended up pulling for the Mexican diver, who came in fourth.
Well, it’s over until next time. Sorry for such a grouchy posting. I’m not really against sports. On to that other contest in November.