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I've been contemplating the Olympics just past and musing on my keen lack of interest in them.
When I was a kid, I was enthralled with them, I was their biggest fan...now not so much. Maybe it's the cheating. Yeah, that's probably it.
I figure basically every gold medal given out in track and field or swimming will be stripped in a day to come because a roids test of some sort will come back positive. Why make the emotional investment?
Just ask Lance Armstrong fans how they felt last week...every one of his seven Tour de France titles taken away because of his apparent cheating.
How can I be truly happy for a winner who I suspect did it by cheating? Answer: I can't.
This all just begins to get silly.
But then, as I mused, I began to ponder the original purpose of the modern Olympic Games. They were created for the cause of peace in the world, the theory being that if people interact in a common language (sports) they will come to see that we are all essentially the same, and that that understanding will make them less likely to go to war.
It would be hard to measure the effectiveness of that strategy precisely. It's difficult to know how many wars the Olympics have prevented. But there is a statement I've been making for about fourteen years now to business teams across the country: "In life, people fight for the people they know."
In other words, if you give your team opportunities to get to know and understand each other as people, then they are much more likely to pull together when the chips are down. On that level it is certainly true; I've seen it play out again and again.
In much the same regard, George Washington stated a higher purpose for higher education. He saw it not only as an opportunity for the best and brightest to further their intellectual prowess, he saw it as a huge national team-building exercise where young people would be drawn from every corner of the country to interact and better understand each other. By that he saw a stronger nation.
Same theory.
So maybe the winning and losing, the pomp, the circumstance, the cheating, the stripping of medals may all mean less than the simple fact that we are interacting...the Olympics are a vehicle to get to know each other just a little bit more.
Maybe that alone makes them worth the enthusiasm they seek to generate. If they make, to whatever degree, for a better and more peaceful and understanding world, then I will once again be the Olympics' biggest fan.
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