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Lord, what a relief it is, to be obsessed with the Olympics. Most years, I catch glimpses, but this summer has been hot and hard, and I needed to obsess about something other than illness, home repairs, and work. Why not savor my favorite city and immerse myself in other people’s hard work, the kind that has already paid off by carrying them to the peak of their sport? I bookmark the schedule, rearrange my own, and settle in with chips, salsa, and enough frozen margarita to last me.
I did not expect such angst. My husband, who is mercifully uninterested in sports and tends to puncture most mainstream enthusiasms with rational critique, snoozes obediently next to me. I have made him promise not to utter a single scathing remark, and apparently this is his solution. The dog snores at our feet. I scooch to the edge of the sofa, muscles as tense as the athletes’, and hold my breath for the synchronized dives. I sigh for Katie Ledecky, predict the German swimmer’s win by the set of his jaw before the race, cheer hard for Simone Biles. “Shit!” I yell when Brody Malone falls, right after we watched him videotaped on horseback, recovered through sheer grit from his previous fall. Both husband and dog startle awake. I explain, and they settle back in, ceiling fan cooling them softly, the house quiet save the murmur of the television and—“Fuck!”
“Now what?” Andrew mumbles. I babble about how amazing Frederick Richard was and wail about his landing.
“Since when are you so interested in men’s gymnastics?”
“I’m not. Though it is rather beautiful. But sweetheart, this is the human story. Ambition, aspiration, discipline, hard work, luck, serendipity, glory, limelight, and then the biggest dream of all, and a half-inch miss and catastrophe.”
He nods, but only because I am so upset. I know what he is thinking: that this is not our story. Neither of us ever had that much ambition. We work hard because we were raised to do so, and we are conscientious without aspiration. Little pleasures tickle us. We would rather have steady contentment than glory—or at least that is how we rationalize.
Still, the other makes a better story arc. And it does resonate, even scaled down. My latest act of courage was returning to the weedy patch where a tick gave me Lyme disease and pulling more weeds. Granted, I was draped in mosquito netting, and I hosed myself off with a firehouse nozzle afterward. But it felt like returning to the floor mat after a tumble. This week’s grand ambition is to find somebody to install new garage doors, and if I get a callback in record time, I intend to shake up a bottle of Champagne.
The Olympics’ advertisers understand this. Those brilliant commercials show little ones stumbling toward a goal post and then, as the ball glides through, raising tiny fists. They hint at adult disparagement—“only a hobby,” “he’ll grow out of it”—and show what can happen when you follow your dream. The sort of dream we all once cherished—before we decided it was grandiose, impossible, and embarrassing.
My favorite commercial comes, to my surprise, from a pharmaceutical company. Lilly gently notes that every body is different—some are lean and petite, suitable for balance beam, while others take up a lot of space (weight-lifters) or need to talk with their hands. But we only get one body, the voice-over reminds us, and as we smile tenderly over a newborn, Lilly promises to “fight like hell” for that body.
I vow to try. Bodies are too easy to take for granted. We learn, as kids, that ours has a few weirdnesses, asymmetries, quirks. These flaws mortify us through our teens, and then we make our peace with our wacky little body and proceed to ignore it for the next several decades. Those are the immortal years when old people’s monologues about disease and poor health strike us as boring, as though old people deliberately choose to focus on their bodies as some sort of shallow, uninteresting self-indulgence. Not as a logical response to the biggest challenges they have ever encountered.
You would think we could all live as athletes, carefully controlling what we feed ourselves, rehabbing the slightest injury diligently to stay in top form, pulling from our bodies every bit of strength, grace, and coordination possible. A body deserves that kind of care. Yet to me, it always sounded exhausting. Those poor jockeys, skipping meals so they would qualify to ride. Those poor jocks, spending long hours every day sweating through boring drills. So much more fun to slump on a sofa and amuse myself, chips and dip at my elbow.
I have reached the age at which the body takes its revenge. Yet I still dream of treats and sloth. If the body is a temple, mine is Angor Wat. This, I realize only as I write, is one more reason I am loving the Summer Olympics. Staring at those exquisite bodies, feeling my muscles tense with theirs and my neurons fire in sympathy, I feel somehow more connected to my own flesh. I sit a little straighter on the sofa, clip the chip bag a little sooner. I still reside in this squishy container, but I can at least marvel at what others can make of it.
Like athletes choosing their sport, we all pick a different aspect of self to emphasize and refine. Then we pass midlife and find it is time to turn our attention to the aspects we ignored. The shift makes for odd conversation—not only do I, who ignored my skin, bone, and muscle for years, now drone on about the body’s vagaries, but I also find myself exuberant about my forays with a chain saw and my newfound passion for the outdoors.
Once I could talk intelligently about Proust. Now, my obsessions play to my weaknesses rather than my strengths. This is making me a better listener, because I know so little about what excites me. I cannot dip in, summon a little expert knowledge, and move on. I have to watch every sport in Paris and Tahiti, read about it, ask dumb questions, feel my way into those athletes’ experience. The usual distractions fall away. I brush aside lesser demands on my time; they can wait. It feels good to throw all my energy in a single direction.
An Olympic quest, scaled down.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
