The Olympic Games return to Paris after a century’s absence, yet there is little excitement in the air. In Middle America, I really don’t hear anybody talking about them. Occasionally, some sports commercial reminds viewers about athletes whose names have largely been forgotten since their last appearance on the world stage. A few Big Box stores are selling Olympic-themed t-shirts, toys, dog leashes, drink mugs, and other sundries. Now and then, someone remarks that this would be a terrible time to visit the City of Light. Besides the knickknacks and small talk, though, few seem to care.
The television ratings over the last several Olympics bear out this general apathy. The well-produced spectacle has been steadily losing eyeballs during the first quarter of the present century, and there is no sign that the trend will reverse. I have seen many writers chalk this up to the growing number of streaming options peeling erstwhile viewers away. There is certainly truth in the observation that any program will receive more attention when people have fewer entertainment alternatives.
However, something else has changed. Passion for the Olympics is not what it once was. Water-cooler conversation about which American heroes will win gold medals and which foreign athletes pose the greatest challenge has all but disappeared. Americans still tune in for the Super Bowl with gusto. They still love baseball and basketball, and they’ve grown to embrace NASCAR, hockey, and soccer, too. If you walk into a sports bar, you can find people enthusiastically watching darts, bowling, boxing, volleyball, sport fishing and just about any other kind of contest or game. Yet here we approach one of the toughest athletic competitions in the world, and in my neck of the woods, there is a collective shrug.
I think there is a simple — albeit disheartening — explanation. It is tough for people to get emotionally invested in games that pit nations against each other when our news media and entertainment culture regularly disparage patriotic love of country as something that should be detested or even feared. In this Age of Globalism — a period during which international institutions and associations (e.g., the EU, UN, and WHO) have been trumpeted as “progressive” achievements and national allegiances are regularly impugned as “nativist,” “racist,” or even “fascist” — sporting events that encourage individual nation states to compete for greatness seem anachronistic.
It doesn’t help that various teams representing the United States in recent years have chosen to use their status as national ambassadors to kneel in protest of their country during America’s national anthem. The U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team has been notorious in this regard. How are American spectators expected to respond to such anti-American behavior? In the past, much of the appeal for tuning into international sporting competitions has been the natural feeling of camaraderie that exists among citizens from the same country. An American who has never watched a single soccer match might end up energetically screaming at a television screen in support of the women’s club simply because those talented female athletes have put themselves on the line to represent Americans’ shared homeland. As American athletes began kneeling in front of the world, they made it very difficult for Americans watching from home to feel a common connection. Why would a casual spectator invest time and energy cheering athletes who embarrass America?
For their part, too many of those athletes express a kind of selfish devotion to personal glory that is antithetical to any larger self-sacrifice done in the name of national honor. Anyone who has ever seen Kurt Russel’s fantastic portrayal of Herb Brooks, the legendary hockey coach who led Team U.S.A. to victory over the dominant Soviet squad in the 1980 Olympics, is familiar with an important scene in the movie Miracle in which he teaches his players through sheer exhaustion that the name on the front of their jerseys is a helluva lot more important than the one on the back. For those U.S. athletes who would rather take a knee than fight through pain, Coach Brooks’s lesson has been lost or rejected. To be sure, there are still many competitors who shed tears as they stare up at the American flag and mouth the words to the Star-Spangled Banner, but there are others who look as if they could not care less about the country they purportedly represent.
Surely the greatest Olympic glory arises not with those American athletes who achieve personal records or commercial fame but rather with those American competitors who endure tremendous hardship for the benefit of their fellow countrymen. Who could forget Mary Lou Retton fighting through agonizing pain to claim victory in the ’84 Los Angeles Olympics? Who doesn’t remember Kerri Strug limping on an injured ankle in ’96 before sticking the landing on a vault that earned Team U.S.A. gold in Atlanta? Both gymnasts became legendary figures because they proved willing to sacrifice their health and well-being in service to their country. Their perseverance through obvious adversity revealed heroic virtue.
In contrast, such sacrifice seemed missing three years ago when Simone Biles withdrew from the team gymnastics final in Tokyo to “focus on” her “mental health.” Biles is a phenomenal athlete and her decision not to compete may have been prudent and necessary, but for many Americans who watched Russian gymnasts take gold in Japan, it was difficult not to recall Retton’s and Strug’s selflessness or to ponder Coach Brooks’s demand that the name on the front mean more than the one on the back.
And if something has changed — if American athletes no longer see themselves as part of something greater than themselves — then surely they reflect an American society that, likewise, no longer thinks of itself as part of something larger and more meaningful, too. I can’t help but feel that it is one more discouraging sign of a nation working hard to destroy itself.
Every Independence Day left-leaning pundits on TV and left-leaning America-bashers on social media express their horror at the sight of so many American flags hanging from buildings and bridges and waving from neighborhood lawns and pickup trucks. Patriotic fervor is equated to some kind of xenophobic disease. The federal government openly invites foreign nationals to cross into our country illegally, while the FBI nonsensically labels Americans eager to secure our borders possible “domestic terrorists.” From top to bottom, this country is losing any sense of itself.
As a nation that has attracted immigrants from all over the world, the United States is no stranger to ethnic clashes and internecine conflicts. As an historic melting pot of many cultures, however, it has survived to grow stronger with time. People who have watched American athletes perform at the Olympic Games have long witnessed the tenacity of a nation bonded together not merely through blood but also through shared principle. Only the United States could field Olympic teams filled with men and women of every shade of color who nonetheless fight together as part of one family representing one unified country.
If that long-enduring truth no longer feels as certain as in decades past, it is because those who despise America’s foundations in liberty have worked hard to tear America apart. They have diminished and dishonored American citizenship, and they have beguiled a generation of young Americans into seeing patriotic self-sacrifice as the root of much evil. If the Olympic Games no longer captivate Americans as they once did, it is because both athletes and spectators have lost sight of their shared duty to each other. Unity inspires victory, and victory inspires unity. A country divided against itself, though, is a country comfortable with defeat. And nobody tunes in for that.
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