Jim Taylor’s Weblog

Sunday February 28, 2010

Shining moments beyond the medals

By Jim Taylor

The 21st Winter Olympic Games end today.
        When the Games opened, the Globe and Mail headlined these Games as “Our Shining Hour.”
        They weren’t. Even if we did collect far more medals per capita than more populous nations.
        By the beginning of this week, Chris Rudge, CEO of the Canadian Olympic Committee, admitted that Canada’s “Own the Podium” campaign might have been over-optimistic.
        At that point, Rudge conceded, “We’d be living in a fool’s paradise if we said we were going to catch the Americans.”
        The campaign might even have harmed some athletes’ performances, Rudge mused, by placing unrealistic pressures on them. They pushed themselves too hard, then felt they had let their country down by merely coming fourth.
        Humph! If I could be fourth-best in the world at anything, I’d consider that an incredible achievement. To imply that fourth, or fifth, or 17th, isn’t good enough must feel like a slap in the face.
        Canada’s “Own the Podium” campaign essentially sold our soul to the slogan attributed to football coach Vince Lombardi: “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”
        In reality, Lombardi plagiarized the quote from UCLA Bruins football coach Henry Russell ("Red") Sanders, some 20 years earlier.
        Our obsession with winning medals ran counter to two other famous sports maxims. “It’s not that you won or lost but how you played the game,” wrote journalist Grantland Rice.
        And, “The most important thing… is not winning but taking part,” comes from the founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin.

Emotional performances
        Nevertheless, I do celebrate some shining moments. A few even involved those medals Canada was supposed to harvest like plucking apples off a tree.
        Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir’s performance in the pairs ice dance was beauty incarnate. Their timing, their coordination, their choreography was flawless. From my perspective – though probably not from theirs – the gold medal was almost incidental, icing on the cake.
        They soared. The medal merely confirmed that they had soared.
        Joannie Rochette won a bronze medal Thursday night in women’s figure skating. But for me, her shining moment came Tuesday night. Two days before, Rochette’s 55-year-old mother had died, suddenly and unexpectedly, of a heart attack. On Tuesday night, Joannie Rochette went out onto the ice and skated her heart out in the short program.
        At the end of their programs, other skaters pumped their fists in the air, shouted in exultation, basked in the applause. Joannie Rochette burst into tears. As she waited for the judges’ score, she sobbed uncontrollably.
        I don’t think the crowd that gave her a standing ovation cared about her score. They cheered her courage, her commitment, her refusal to give up.

Courage to carry on
        Another shining moment resulted from the loss of a medal. Kirsti Richards of Summerland had set a breakneck pace in the final of the women’s moguls. Too fast, perhaps. She crashed spectacularly.
        She could have slunk off to the sidelines. She didn’t.
        She got up. She put on her skis again. With the clock still ticking, she completed her run. She hit the moguls hard and fast, and finished with what may have been the best jump of the evening.
        A final shining moment, to my mind, didn’t even occur in Vancouver.
        Songwriter Gilles Vigneault refused to let the Olympic marketing machine roll over him.
        Vigneault’s ode to winter, “Mon pays, c’est l’hiver,” has become almost a national anthem in Quebec. Olympic organizers wanted to buy rights to the song.
        Vigneault said no. Not just once, but three times. He feared – with some justification – that they would shorten, amend, or otherwise misuse the integrity of his creation.
        Olympic officials wanted the song so badly, reported Canadian Press, “that they contacted Quebec Premier Jean Charest in the hope he might be able to change Vigneault’s mind.”

Smears and smut
        Small things. But they stand out for me as shining lights amid the stampede of what Matthew Arnold called “darkling armies” pursuing medals and profits at any price.
        They make some of the other concerns about these games feel tawdry by comparison.
        The fracas over the amount of French in the opening and the medal ceremonies, for example. The issue itself is valid in a bilingual nation. The outpouring of venom in internet blogs and twitters was not.
        Syndicated columnist Chantal Hebert called it an “unpalatable stew of bigotry, ignorance, and anger…”
        Beyond racism, there’s always smut. As Lorna Dueck reported in the Globe and Mail, “News that Canadian pimps have forced prostitutes into Vancouver to service tourists during the Olympics is not the kind of commerce we expected as proud host of the Winter Games.”
        The Vancouver Province documented a “staggering increase in demand for prostitution in Vancouver and Whistler.”
        And Craigslist posted this Internet ad: “New and young girls are welcome to our family. Take advantage of the Olympics to make a large sum of money.”
        These hardly constitute “our shining hour.” Regardless of how many medals we end up with.

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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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Your Turn



Several letters just told me not to feel guilty about failing to produce a column last Sunday.
        Trina Norman: “You deserve a Sunday off once in a while. Enjoy it and let the creative juices simmer a bit longer.”
        Karen Stoner shared a few thoughts about the Olympic curling matches, and added, “Thanks for printing simply people’s thoughts.”
        Larry Joose echoed those sentiments: “You deserve a break. I don’t know where all your energy and inspiration comes from in the first place. Although you may not be a big fan of the Olympics, I hope you can enjoy seeing some of the athletes do their thing.”

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About My Books

Over the years, I think I have written (or ghostwritten) about 17 books. Several of them (mercifully) are no longer available from any source. But here’s a listing of those that are still available. The ones marked “WLB”, you can order from Wood Lake Books, either on-line at http://www.woodlakebooks.com, or call Wood Lake Books directly at 1-800-663-2775 in Canada, 1-800-654-5129 (Pilgrim Press) in the U.S. The ones marked “JT only” are now available only directly from me — as collector’s items, I price them all at $25 Cdn.

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