When I think of the Olympic Games, I think of American sports commentator, Jim McKay, at the 1976 summer Olympics in Montreal. Wearing a turtleneck under his polyester sport coat, the man leaned into the camera one evening and said all manner of meaningful things about THE TRIUMPH OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT. A breath caught in my six-year-old chest because his words, vast and laced with the fear of God, rattled me. And I loved it. Also, I got it in my young head that Quebec was a communist country where her people were surely oppressed—and wasn’t that all so very sad?—but I digress.
That same Olympics of ’76, my siblings and I huddled around our black and white TV to watch Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci win the gold. During the winter games that year, we witnessed American figure skater Dorothy Hamill capture the gold too. And those two athletes grabbed my heart, mind, and all control over my sense of style for a couple of years.
I was impressionable at age six—who isn’t?—and Mom let me get both the long-sleeved white leotard (with red and blue stripes down the sides) like Nadia AND the bob haircut Dorothy made famous. I pranced around on our front lawn that summer performing gymnastic sequences that ended in crisp round-offs. When I finished my routines, I threw my arms straight in the air, back arched, to signal it was time for my audience, a.k.a. siblings seated on the cement front steps, to applaud. And I think they did—probably while slapping at mosquitos and tending to drippy popsicles.
Come winter at the ice skating rink, I performed simple spins, my head tipping back during each rotation so an onlooker might notice the droop of my Dorothy Hamill wedge. After all, what was a twirl without the hair to punctuate it? And I think that was the same year I took skating lessons at the hockey arena in Thief River Falls, Minnesota, and made it into the ice show. Not only was I cast as a townsperson in Cinderella, I was cast as a male townsperson who got to wear a pair of knickers with matching vest, my blonde hair stuffed into a short brown wig. Backstage, somebody else’s mom drew a mustache on my upper lip with a black Sharpie, and not even Vaseline could erase that manly mark for at least a few days. But again, I digress.
Olympic memories explode in my brain like the popcorn I plan to munch with the family while watching the competitions this year. In 1992, Soviet Unified athlete Tatiana Gutsu, “the painted bird of Odessa,” brought the awe to me like the gymnasts of my childhood. In 2008, American swimmers, Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte, demolished the world—and our belief that humans have physical limitations. In 2018, American track and field runner, Tyson Gay, charmed us even more with his beard than his speed. That same year, Canadian ice dancers, Scott Moir and Tessa Virtue, melted the ice with their chemistry, and we wanted them to never stop skating together EVER, please, and admit they were a couple in real life too because we couldn’t sleep without knowing for sure.
Starting tomorrow, Tokyo is the site for the 2021 Olympic Games, and I already feel the inspiration coming on. I’m sure we’ll hear about athletes doing more of life with coaches than parents, 3:00 a.m. wakeup alarms every morning of every week, and gyms that break bodies into perfection. Nothing like a good human interest story, replete with its physically exhausting and emotionally trying details, to jostle my life of comparable ease.
Oh, that triumph of the human spirit. It gets me every time.
*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.