Where were you when you remember the first Olympics in your life? Did they inspire and excite you? Did they make you think of your potentials and dreams?
Did the Olympics ever put you in a place of nationalism or internationalism that has continued to play a part of your own identity, your station as a human, your position on the planet?
Have the Olympics made you a more complete individual and human being?
If not, I ask you to consider the following things about the international competition we know as the Olympics Games. The Olympiad, begun modernly the year my mother's parents were born, 1896.
In 1976 I was big five year old, and my family took a long road trip from southern Indiana through eastern Canada and the northeast United States. We took a stop in Montreal and thereabouts, and I remember seeing Olympic Stadium and the site of the events that year.
Watching the ceremonies and competitions on television was an introduction to a bigger world. Of course, everything was pretty big back then, because I wasn't that big a five year old.
Who is?
Bruce Jenner was bigger than life. Decathlete extraordinnaire and American hero. He was Captain America embodied.
Wheaties box legend.
I later saw a movie about him as a child, he had bed wetting problems and he would race home to hide his bed sheets hanging outside the window so his fellow classmates wouldn't see them from the bus.
I had bed wetting problems till I was six or seven years old. At the end of the show about this future world champion, little Bruce hides out in a furniture store and falls asleep on a big bed. It remains dry to the amazement of the parents when he is found the next morning.
He needed a bigger bed.
And perhaps that is what we all need.
How big a bed do we sleep in?
Our country celebrated its 200th birthday that year of the Montreal Summer Olympics.
It has been another 32 since then, and we should know and feel as well as at any time in our national history that we share this planet with many others. And sports are a measure of our unitedness and our greatness, our shared humanity and achievement as a race.
Oil and investments, stocks and energy, food prices and home rentals and purchases; whether we are middle class American citizens or Chinese peasants, Indian corporate gurus or starving Africans, we all are represented through the majesty, spectacle, lifelong effort and sheer determination of the athletes and delegations involved.
1980 was affected by politics. We pulled out of Moscow, which affected Los Angeles in 1984. Things related to the bogey man Osama were getting going back then. But it didn't stop the household names of Carl Lewis and Mary Lou Retton from arriving on the scene.
1988 and Seoul was good, but it was tainted by Ben Johnson being doped.
1992 was great in Barcelona, Spain. USA Basketball became a novelty of domination.
1996 was good in Atlanta, mired by a bombing and the Richard Jewell fiasco. On a personal note, a high school associate that I had a crush on back when won the silver in rowing.
That was a nice touch for me as a guy half way through his twenties, struggling to make a life for myself. Dedication and perspiration can lead to fame and glory. Even to a girl from my neighborhood. But more importantly, hard work and a dream, a goal of destiny may lead to something far more real: accomplishment.
Michael Johnson? Wow.
2000 was very cool in Sydney, Australia. Kathy Freeman was a huge symbol of what humanity can mean to us. Aborigines became a more accepted part of that great land, and thus to the world.
2004 finally made it back to "Hellas" (Greece), the impetus of it all. It was 108 years since the modern restoration of the games, and it was a fitting return.
So here we are in the throes of 2008. Huge gas prices and fires and floods and earhtquakes and typhoons and droughts and wars and extremism and mortgage woes and stock insecurity...
But somehow the Beijing games will show that we have more to hope and dream for than to fear.
Right?
World War War 1 ended the hopes of 1916.
The Second World War knocked out two, 1940 and 1944. 1972 was blighted by the terrorist attack in Munich.
But we must keep striving.
Keep moving, running, swimming, jumping, bouncing, hurling, rowing, twisting, and working as a team, living for the chance, the moment, the culmination and the process...
For the dream.
We live in a big bed.
And there is no reason to fear.
Celebrate the Olympics and its competitors, from first to last, from biggest to smallest.
Celebrate the world.
Celebrate yourself.
Enjoy the best of yourself and humanity reflected in these games.
Do you remember the first time you saw the Olympics? I hope the child in you looks for those moments again. Because they are real and meaningful.
Victory and defeat, life on a stage of grand proportions, all signified by hidden toil and strife.
edclinch
My earliest Olympic memories are that of the '68 Olympics. That was perhaps the greatest of the modern day. So many great feats of achievement and none was more memorable than that of Bob Beamon's legendary long jump.
Therein we had the tragedy of '72 and to Atlanta and then Greece.
Still the single greatest event in track and field ever ! Bob Beamon's (8.95m- 29' 2 1/2")
My sincerest regard to you and your immediate family this 4th of July !
Thank you dearly tophatal: More than once I have gotten emotional watching the the black athletes on the podium in 1968 raising their fists in symbolic power and freedom.
It gives me goos bumps thinking about it.
MLK, Robert K and hundreds of protestors at Zocalo were killed that year...
edclinch We're somehow inclined to believe that we've progressed onwards since then. But looking around I'm not so sure that we've moved that far forward. I think that the world in some respects is in an even bigger quagmire now than it was in the mid to late sixties.
And there still seems to be no respite ahead for us at all. And that's depite the rosy picture that some are trying to paint for us. I prefer the reality of what's happening now rather than looking at things through rose col*ored glasses like so many often would want us to.
That sort of stuff is for young kids who've not reached adolescence as of yet.
They're the one's who still believe in fairy tales.
I have lived in a few different sports areas and I am faithful to these places and their passions, give or take. I was born and raised in Bloomington, Indiana (1970-1989). Bob Knight was a central figure. I then lived in Chile for two years, where soccer became more of a presence on my global map. After returning to the Hoosier state one year, 1992, I became more aware of college football for a five year stint in Provo, Utah (1993-1997). BYU Cougar football! I made another return to Indiana from 1997 to 1999, and then spent the last six years in southern California, minus the last six months of 2005, in southern Chile again. And I got back yesterday, UPDATE:Now in Loudoun Cty, Northern VA! I am in the South! I love sports enough to think that they matter...Some how.
