The Best of the Best

Indulge me, imagine a museum where in one gallery you could see the sculpture Niké of Samothrace (ca. 190 B.C.E.), from the Louvre, and in the next gallery Botticelli’s, Birth of Venus (1485-1486) from the Uffizi, in Florence, then the woodblock print of the Great Wave (1830-33) by Katsushika Hokusai from the Tokyo National Museum, and one more Picasso’s Guernica (1937) from the Reina Sofia in Madrid. Let’s go for broke, when you come out to the great hall and look up there is Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling (1474-1481) with its iconic Creation of Man.

In my opinion there is an analogy in sports, the quadrennial Olympic Games. The coverage of the events that ended last week in Paris and elsewhere in France (no surfing in town) provided a history lesson. We were reminded that the Olympics can be traced back to 776 B.C. Created in honor of the Greek God Zeus, it was a sports festival and a religious and artistic one. This year’s programming highlighted the fact that the Olympics were revived in France in 1894 after a long hiatus. Apparently, the games which had become a tourist attraction and were banned in 393 A.D as promoting paganism!

I cannot say that I am a sports enthusiast. I enjoyed baseball when my father took me to games in New York, but I lost interest when the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1957. Still, I have always enjoyed the best of the best. For a number of years, I followed Formula One car races and attended a few at Watkins Glen in New York and Silverstone in England. Wimbledon Tennis has always been a favorite. Now the televised Olympics have brought us the best of the best.

Again, you have to use your imagination but this time it is the facts that are difficult to fathom. In Paris this year six continents sent representatives, only Antarctica was missing. From those continents, 206 countries and territories sent contestants which amounted to almost 11,000 athletes in 42 different disciplines!

The youngest contestant this year was Zheng Haohao a skateboarder from China age 11 and the oldest participant was the Spanish Equestrian Juan Antonio Jimenez Cobo, age 65.

But what made the Olympics so special, particularly right now, when partisanship seems at an all-time high, is that participants from countries that are political rivals, not only competed with each other but showed respect for each other. We witnessed a lot of high-fives among teammates and also with their rivals, and I believe I saw them sometimes hugging members of the other side.

In one case, American gymnasts Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles literally bowed down to their competition, Brazilian gymnast Rebeca Andrade, after she won gold.

If more people would recognize that kind of respect….