This year a family beach vacation overlapped with the Olympics, so I was able to get a huge dose of the events from London. I am one of those people who loves the summer games, and I was able to indulge that passion more than any year since probably 1984.
I’m always surprised at how much emotion the games stir up in me. I see people rise to the zenith, often having worked in obscurity for years. I watch disappointment made all the tougher because most of them only get one shot every four years in their chosen endeavor.
But there’s a bittersweet feeling around it all. It’s not just that I understand the complaints of those turned off by the medal counts, the cheating, the jingoism, the hyperbole, and Mary Carillo. While I like so much that the Olympics will hatch a dream in some kids out there who want to fence, or swim, or grapple, or run, or row their way to a gold medal, I wonder if the way we are shown the games adds a peculiar, particular pressure on those already feverish parents who see in their children a chance to make up for their own unfulfilled dreams.
A couple years ago I wrote about mass “inception,” [1] based on the movie [2]of that name out at that time, thinking satirically about parents who try to implant their own sporting dreams into their children’s minds. While I enjoy so many Olympic moments, I wonder if the games we see encourage this. After all, on TV, we mainly see the champions. It’s rare that we see a competitor who finished 22nd. We don’t get to look into that person’s eyes or hear that person’s story.
That’s a shame, because if that person was once a child who was driven by an intrinsic desire to be the best and worked to his or her own limits, then that 22nd place is the end point of a life journey as great as that of the winner’s.
Because that journey, the path was itself fulfilling. As we enter fall and the sports cycle begins anew (although does it ever really end any more?), you might ask yourself this simple question: What did your kids do all summer? Did they stay outside, quietly practicing while no one else was looking, until the mosquitoes almost carried them away each night? Did they watch the Olympics events in their sport, rapt, fascinated? (I can tell you my kids most certainly did not, instead thinking dad, who was sitting there all misty-eyed on the couch blubbering, “You have to watch this!” over and over again, had lost it.) Or did they take part in an endless shuttling to and from practices, camps, and trainers, all organized, facilitated, and prodded by you?
If without their handlers and schedulers, their balls and gloves and sticks gathered dust — if they spent their summer just being kids — then whose dream is really being pursued?
It takes some soul searching to answer that question after thousands of dollars and your own significant emotional, financial, and time commitments. Yes, many Olympic stories include supportive parents who at times had to push, to encourage. But it’s simple: Your commitment and interest cannot replace your children’s, however much we might be in a peculiar parenting era in which we believe they can.
As you watch one gold medal national anthem after another, it can all start to seem so attainable in some disconnected way. Yet the Olympic athlete is an unusual combination of desire, natural talent, and opportunity. I like Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers [3] take on this type of thing; he describes how the highest levels of success take an incredibly rare match of fortunate circumstances with an astonishing time commitment (he talks about expertise in terms of 10,000 hours of commitment: Yep, 10,000 hours).
The Olympics leaves me so emotionally wrung because I love seeing people define and reach a goal. I think about the things they gave up, the amount of effort, and it gets me all maudlin about the human spirit. I know behind these individuals is a network of people who made their own commitment, especially parents. But the commitment has to reside primarily in the athlete.
The sports-centric parents I know, and I know a lot of them, have done more than their share to create the opportunity part of this equation. Henry Clay [4] once said, “The time will come when Winter will ask you what you were doing all Summer.” The question that will define your child will be about what they did all summer, not what you made them do. Thinking of someone standing up with a medal listening to a national anthem as the culmination of another person’s dream seems perverse, and it also seems impossible.
- Author Bio [5]
- Latest Posts [6]
[7]Scott Warnock [8]
[7]Latest posts by Scott Warnock (Posts [9])
- An Eagle’s farewell: Nothing artificial about it [10] - March 29, 2024
- Friends of all ages [11] - March 6, 2024
- AI overlord inevitability?: My fantasy team says no [12] - January 19, 2024
- Three-volley salute–and fathers and sons [13] - December 18, 2023
- Trains do not keep a rollin’ [14] - October 21, 2023