Excellence is good, but goodness is better. That is why these Games conquered us so thoroughly
I was conquered by the Vancouver Olympics. I did not expect to be — it’s easier to poke fun at the manifest absurdity of the five-ring circus. It is especially so with the winter variety, comprised as they are of various events of frozen madness. I am not inclined to follow sports that I would otherwise never watch simply because the Olympic adjective is attached. I care about hockey and curling; to the rest I remain indifferent.
Yet this time it was different, to my own surprise. I knew something was going on when I watched figure skating for the first time since 1988, when as Calgary teenagers we had our hopes pinned on Brian Orser, who failed in his bid to win gold.
I have never been a silver medal sort of person. Finishing second in the Olympics is remarkable, just as it is an achievement to make the final at Wimbledon or get to the championship game at the World Cup. Yet winning is the ultimate measure of excellence at the elite level, and losing remains just that, losing, no matter how impressive the achievement of coming second or third. There are no silver medals for the losers of the Stanley Cup final. American goalie Ryan Miller got it exactly right when he said after losing the gold medal game: “I feel like s—.” Had the result been reversed, 34 million Canadians would have said the same.
Which is why the controversy over the Own The Podium program was altogether silly. The entire program cost less than your standard-issue government boondoggle; perhaps the federal government should have erected a massive billboard in Vancouver advertising it as part of the stimulus action plan. The obvious point is that if you want gold medals then, like many other prestigious things, they have to be bought and paid for. The communists, of all people, made that plain generations ago. It is entirely unremarkable to acknowledge that Olympic medals don’t come for free. Money doesn’t guarantee success, but a lack of it usually means failure. Every hockey mom who works bingo to raise money for equipment and ice time and travel knows that. Excellence has its price.
Canada achieved excellence in Vancouver. Yet that is not why our country was so utterly moved by this Olympic experience. Excellence can be coarse and ignoble, and its pursuit can bring out the worst in the soul even as it celebrates the achievements of the body; not for nothing did the Olympics devise an aggressive drug-testing system. Excellence at any price can be corrosive precisely to the spirit.
In the same way, the goodness of the virtues can elevate the spirit. That explains why I was watching figure skating , hoping along with an entire nation that Joannie Rochette would get her bronze medal. Who cheers for bronze medals? (The whole idea of bronze medal games is itself slightly ridiculous.) It was not only excellence that attracted us, but courage and grace. Excellence is good, but goodness is better.
That is why these Games conquered us so thoroughly. It began with the remarkable tale of Frederic Bilodeau and his younger brother Alexandre, who won Canada’s first gold medal. Frederic’s parents, committed to providing as good an upbringing as they could for a son afflicted with cerebral palsy, thought they could not manage another child. Then Frederic, no more than a little boy himself, told his parents that he wanted not more things or opportunities, but a brother. Hence Alexandre. And for pure goodness, was there any sight to rival that of the Bilodeau brothers achieving excellence together?
Canadians expect the full range of human emotion when it comes to hockey, and on Sunday afternoon millions of sphincters tightened in unison, and millions of eyes filled with tears. But there were tears for more than hockey. There were tears of sorrow for the young Georgian luger who was killed; tears of regret for those many athletes who strove and yet failed to win; and most of all, tears of common joy for the sheer goodness we witnessed over and over again. Our athletes were not only excellent at these games. They were good. That is why we were so proud.
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