Playing Through
If an athlete's character is defined by failure, not success, what does a manic obsession with success say about the character of a nation?
By Thomas Hackett, Fri., Aug. 22, 2008
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that those elastic little Chinese gymnasts who won the team gold are not, as Olympic rules stipulate they must be, at least 15 years old. But then we knew that already, didn't we? Every two years, the planet suspends its disbelief during the winter and summer games, pretending for a few weeks to be a "happier and friendlier place." In China, the soothing fictions have been raised to a highly self-conscious art, where nobody is deceived by the chicanery – and nobody really minds, either.
"We are now in the process of trying to manage that": This seems to be the motto of the Beijing con job. The elderly and poor have been banished from sight. Slums have been razed. The stadiums for many events have been filled by rent-a-fans hired to make sure China appears "flawless in image." That was also the reason Olympic organizers and the ruling Communist Party gave for the sham of having an adorable Lin Miaoke, age 9, lip-synch a performance of "Ode to the Motherland" actually sung by a slightly less adorable Yang Peiyi, age 7.
Naturally, even people in China were POed about that. "What we need is truth," one online commentator wrote, "not some fake loveliness."
Ah, yes, truth. I vaguely remember a college philosophy professor going on about something like that. Like quantum physics, it seemed an interesting idea that I would never begin to grasp. What, for instance, was truth in art? In religion? At least sports, I used to think before steroids polluted the matter, were free of ontological ambiguities. Somebody won; somebody lost: There could be no postmodern spin on that outcome. The serious athlete couldn't con others, least of all herself. Testing the limits of her abilities, the athlete had to be constantly facing hard facts about herself, without shame, without recourse to comforting conceits.
Take Brendan Hansen of Longhorn Aquatics. NBC wanted to make a big to-do about his rivalry in the breaststroke with Japan's Kosuke Kitajima. Problem was, Hansen failed to qualify for the Olympics in the 200-meter and lost decisively to Kitajima in the 100-meter, coming in fourth. Which is how it goes in sports. A few hundredths of a second can be all the difference between immortality and obscurity.
This is unfortunate and more than a bit deranged. But the athlete who escapes the grip of that neurotic obsession with medals achieves another kind of victory, as Hansen wryly observed. "I've always believed the character of an athlete is defined by failure, not success," he said. "Unfortunately, that was my shining moment. That was the biggest failure of my career."
As NBC has been anxiously keeping me abreast of the daily medal count competition between China and the United States, it makes me wonder if the inverse of Hansen's statement isn't also true. Does a manic obsession with success ultimately only reveal deficiencies in a nation's character?
