When the first event begins, regardless of what the sport or its popularity, the power of the Olympic Games will begin to thrum. The multifaceted, multicultural face of the five rings, its unusual array of athletes and ephemeral feel still holds a simple kind of magic of the circus passing through.
In many ways the Olympics has become a shout out for the little person, a gigantic stage for 32 events, many of which few people in the intervening four years will watch again.
It’s a collaboration of large and small, from football, rugby and athletics to wall climbing, skateboards and weightlifting. People will invest in the personal battles, where ignorance of the rules and nomenclature is no barrier to buy in.
It doesn’t matter that you may know nothing about Rhasidat Adeleke’s 400m split, or even what a split is. Many watching on television will not have any notion of the penalty corner in hockey and it will remain a mystery why the southpaw stance in boxing makes it difficult for other boxers.
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Fans, who apply for tickets to events they would never normally notice, will coo and ahh at how insouciant pole vaulter Armand Duplantis takes off down the track, running his hands to the top of the vault as it bends and propels him probably towards another world record. They will yell and holler if he makes the extra half centimetre.
When Jack Woolley is snarled up in a taekwondo clinch and suddenly unleashes the scorpion kick, a move which is exactly what it says on the can, an attack that weirdly arches from behind his back, sweeping over his shoulder to score a point on an opponent’s head, it will make the armchair fan’s back spasm just in the watching.
People might have heard of Rhys McClenaghan, perhaps only as the “gymnast fella” from Belfast, even though for Poetry Day Ireland, a poem was written about his mastery of balance and control by Rosemary Jenkinson.
“He slaps the horse’s hide into plumes of white floury chalk . . . Pointed like a ballerina in the air, He spins, scissors, spindles and flares,” she wrote about the 24-year-old in her poem Pommel Horse.
Perhaps more than any other sports event, there is the chime of history at the Olympics and not all of it welcome. The deadly bomb explosion in Atlanta in 1996, the attack on Israeli athletes in Munich 1972.
There was also the Fosbury Flop and Bob Beamon’s long, long jump in 1968. Michael Phelps and his 23 gold medals in the swimming pool, a mark that may never be beaten. Also the first ever perfect 10 in gymnastics from a 14-year-old Romanian, Nadia Comăneci, at the Montreal games of 1976, a mark that can never be beaten.
Time zoned LA and Rio make for early mornings and late nights. You might be a highlights fan, but many are not and understand the power of witnessing history taking place as it happens.
Katie Taylor was in real time at the London Olympics of 2012. A woman at the peak of her power evangelising boxing with a lightweight gold medal, the first, in a sport few women would have touched 15 years before.
Only the Olympics has that reach and ability to inflate beyond normal boundaries. Even Ronnie Delany, in a crackling commentary from the other side of the world in 1956 with his win in the 1500m, captured a sense of wonder and distance.
Later when the reel was available and it showed him whirring around the four laps, the plastic and silver coated film looking like it might burst into flames at any moment, Ireland could stop and look at itself as a significant part of a bigger world.
Who is to say which were the most powerful images, Taylor dropping to her knees in the London docklands, or Delany dropping to his knees on the cinder track in Melbourne.
The Olympics are a cross between a global sporting event and a diplomatic mission, its overblown declarations and intentions of creating a better world setting it more comfortably in a less contentious bygone age.
But that too is part of the allure, the modern, slick moneymaking machine thriving in a dog-eat-dog political landscape, still clinging on and promoting the pieties of founder Baron de Coubertin and the myth of ancient virtues.
There is always the whiff that the Olympics is apart from other events such as World Cups, World Athletics Championships or Wimbledon. The conceit that is kept alive is that the famous five rings represent something more than sport.
To others it’s an orgy of drug cheating and lies, China already muddying the water in Paris by sending 11 swimmers already embroiled in a doping scandal. It’s about capricious athletes, selfishness and cynical nations washing their reputations.
It’s about millionaire sportsmen and women garlanding their trophy cabinets with medals, eating in the same mess halls as those athletes who sacrifice careers and health because they believe in the sales pitch and the grandeur.
That’s why the Olympics, when it begins on Wednesday, will draw people towards it. It has a set idea of exactly what it is and like a latter-day chimera can also be exactly what you want it to be.
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