Like many of you, I’ve been viewing bits and pieces of the Paris Summer Olympics over the last two weeks. There’s something alluring about watching the best of the world’s best compete on an international stage. “The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat,” as ABC’s Wide World of Sports used to say, captivates my attention. Hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide apparently feel the same.
To be fair, the Olympics have evolved into a spectacle that goes way beyond athletic competition. There are plenty of negatives to find if you want to look for them. Budget overruns, corruption, scandals, commercialism, boycotts, politics, PEDs, and discrimination increasingly abound in the modern Olympic games, or really any event of such an enormous magnitude.
But I prefer to focus less on the transgender controversy or Snoop Dogg’s seeming omnipresence, and more on what I can learn from the competition itself. So, I find myself wondering, what are my positive takeaways? And what useful lessons have I learned?
Start with symbols
The symbolism of the Olympics has always intrigued me. For example, the official Olympic symbol consists of five intertwined rings, representing the unity of the five inhabited continents. The Olympic rings remind us that despite our differences and diversity, we should constantly be working to find common ground.
To me, those rings are reminiscent of the Latin phrase “E pluribus unum,” the traditional albeit unofficial motto of the United States emblazoned on many U.S. coins. That phrase means “Out of many, one,” a reminder that with brotherly love and in the spirit of compromise, we should constantly be working together for the common good.
Just like our own nation emerged out of a melting pot of global immigrants yearning for a better place to call home.
The Olympic motto, “Citius, Altius, Fortius,” also inspires me. Its translation is “Faster, Higher, Stronger,” a clarion call to become a little better each day in all of our endeavors, whatever they might be. An Olympic athlete’s performance lasts a few hours at most. More typically, just a few minutes. And sometimes even less than ten seconds.
Yet each one has trained day after day after day for years or even decades to ready themselves for that fleeting moment of excellence and potential glory.
Why? Because the real joy is in the journey. Greatness is never achieved all at once. True excellence is made up of baby steps consistently carried out over a lifetime. Anything really worthwhile requires consistent effort, minute by minute, hour after hour, year upon year.
By small and simple means, great things come to pass. Any true champion knows that perfection doesn’t mean flawlessness. It means getting up when you fall, overcoming self-doubts, persevering through pain, resisting the perpetual temptation to quit, and eventually finishing what you started.
That, my friends, is a critical lesson that we all need to learn!
Less well known but equally motivating is the Olympic creed. It reads: “The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.”
Local hero
Approximately 14,000 athletes now compete in the Summer Olympics in 40 different sports and around 450 events. Which means that more than 13,500 of those competitors won’t win a gold medal, and the vast majority won’t medal at all. Boulder City’s own “air pistol extraordinaire,” Lexi Lagan, is one of those.
Which again begs the question, why compete at all when, despite your greatness, the odds of winning or even medaling are stacked so overwhelmingly against you?
Former President Teddy Roosevelt answered that question this way: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually, strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
True victory has nothing to do with trophies. Rather, the actual triumph is in the striving and the struggle and the accompanying blood, sweat, and tears. The real winners are those who dare to get out of bed every day and simply play the game. Legitimate champions fail far more than they succeed. But they consistently give it their all. And they never, ever give up.
Thousands of Paralympians and Special Olympians, like my friend Andy Giroux, have discovered the same thing. Their courage to simply get in the game and keep going elevates my understanding of what it means to be a winner.
So, what positive lessons have the Olympics taught you? Regardless, I hope the Olympic spirit will give you the courage to give life your all today, tomorrow, and always. If so, then you’ll always be a champion in my book.