The Olympics is the greatest classroom

There are 1,413 days left for 14 July 2028. So long for some. Not enough for others. I ask a swimmer who’s just returned from Paris if he is already thinking of Los Angeles. “The short answer is yes.” He laughs. God bless such strange folk and the Olympics.

During my journey back from Paris, I was watching Paris. Being there is a gift, but it’s remarkable how much you don’t see. Not a single race of Léon Marchand’s. Not Teddy Riner flooring the world in judo. But if you got width, I got depth. I went down corridors and past weeping corners into the outskirts of sport where coaches quieten fears and a Zimbabwe swimmer comes last but grins at his Personal Best.

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Attending a Games is a privilege and to watch is humbling. I presume it’s akin to the Montreal jazz festival or The Hay (literature) Festival, just being immersed in an art form. But those feel like pure celebrations, this carries a different heat. To be in Paris was to be dipped into a vat of ambition. Like Sifan Hassan and Tigst Assefa, two young women born in Ethiopia (the first races for the Netherlands), sprinting at the end of the marathon, jostling, desperate, divided by 3 seconds after 42km and then on the ground, next to each other, spent.

When I return from any major games, I wonder: Do I really know anything about sport? Because they are a noisy, relentless education in rules, peculiarities, techniques, excellence and a horse’s mane. In the equestrian event, they are plaited.

Before Paris, a kitefoiler, as fastidious as a watch-maker, told a colleague and me that a fingerprint on his foil could affect how fast he went. A swimming coach, almost speaking a foreign language, explained how she looks at swimmers. “You watch how the water moves around them. You watch how they displace it.”

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Seasons in tennis, basketball, F1, badminton have a familiar, lulling rhythm. The Olympics is compressed and has an intense burn. In the normal world there is a sense of “there’s always next week”, but here “next” time is four years away. When the brilliant Singaporean kitefoiler Max Maeder, only 17, wept after his bronze, it was partly because he realised his next chance would be at 21. For others, four years is too far.

The rugged Emil Zátopek, with four distance-running golds in 1948 and 1952, once said, “When you can’t keep going, go faster”. At the Games I feel I am caught in this sort of wonderful insanity. It is a refresher course in appetites, small sports, big dreams and margins. The archery men’s final was lost by 4.9mm whereupon the loser, Brady Ellison—as Korea’s Maeil business newspaper wrote—“held (winner) Kim Woo-jin’s hand and shouted hooray”.

One afternoon, an arrow’s flight from the Louvre, a hero with a bun reinforced the degree of Olympic difficulty to a group of reporters. “To be able to win a gold medal,” said Michael Phelps, “is less than one per cent of one per cent. It’s that hard.” And still Mijaín López, who won his fifth wrestling gold, can walk down a street mostly unrecognised. So little is known of him it is absurd yet it is a reminder: Fame is not what they necessarily play for.

The Games is a schooling in quirkiness, ugly nationalism, pride, geography (Dominica is not the Dominican Republic, instructed 100m champion Julien Alfred) and single-mindedness. My first night at the swimming at the 400m freestyle final, Ariarne Titmus instinctively walked to lane 4, the lane of the fastest qualifier. It’s where she usually belongs. Katie Ledecky, introduced after her, walked in and gently told her friend and rival that lane 4 was actually hers on this night. It is a story of focus but also grace. Said Ledecky, who lost the race, “I told her, ‘all good, all good,’ because she was freaking out. I didn’t want her to feel bad or anything”.

It’s not that we don’t see respect elsewhere but a Games, with its range of athletes, clarifies better the idea of fraternity. An equestrienne told me competitors from other sports were intrigued by what she wears and does. One wet morning at the rowing, an American told me he puts inspirational stickers on his boat. On one was scribbled the name of an Australian woman rower whose technique he admired.

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I learnt, again, that the Olympics is incredibly noisy. Athletes not used to attention can find it gratifying yet testing. A swimmer at her first Games heard a roar from the crowd while in the call room and slightly lost her composure. But later she spoke and this is something we’ve forgotten in a carefully curated star-driven world. The speaking athlete at their rawest moment, taking questions, offering insight, unafraid to reveal emotion, letting us into sport.

On a cool early morning, in an almost deserted tent at the judo, I met a few members of the Refugee Olympic Team. A single mother wept briefly but mostly they told their stories matter-of-factly—of nations left behind, judo clubs destroyed by war, family not seen, the stereotypes that stalked people like them and their love for judo.

On the mat they had found so many things. Liberation. Pride. Self-respect. Abhinav Bindra, who worked with refugee shooters once, said, “Their self-worth was once so low. Many were lost. And I believe sport gave them meaning and something to strive for.”

As I walked from the judo to find a taxi on a quiet street, I replayed their conversations. I’ve always tried to mine value from sport. What power does it own? Where does it take people? Is it passing entertainment or something more profound? On this Paris morning I’d found some answers.

Rohit Brijnath is an assistant sports editor at The Straits Times, Singapore, and a co-author of Abhinav Bindra’s book A Shot At History: My Obsessive Journey To Olympic Gold. He posts @rohitdbrijnath.

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