Second Thoughts

James Fallows, always worth paying attention to, has a good post today about how American media focus on gold medals, as if getting a silver medal in the frickin' Olympics is a great misfortune and if an athlete they focus on gets one then our hearts should go out to that person in his or her time of trouble and sorrow. Of course this is nuts. But you can see that it comes out of a type of sports coverage that's essentially storytelling. So let's do it ourselves and see how it works.

Let's imagine an athlete—we'll call her Tyler McCardell, 19 years old, from Grand Junction, Colorado. She grew up in a modest house in the foothills of the Rockies, and from the time she was a toddler she was fascinated with—oh, I don't know—throwing the javelin, say. Nuts for the javelin, was Tyler. We see a picture of her, black and white and grainy, which is strange because it was taken in 1994, showing a toddler with curls and a huge grin and her first kid-sized javelin. The pictures continue through school and into college, growing ever more modern in format. Now we're at her kitchen table. Mom, brother, sister, dog. But no Dad. We see still pictures of him too. Which means, of course, that he's dead. Of, um, cancer. He held on until the day it was announced that Tyler would be on the Olympic javelin squad. But he'll never see her in the Olympics. And Tyler's eyes fill up.

Stories need conflict, and the conflict here is that the McCardells are sad because they not only lost Dad, he won't get to see Tyler compete. But he can be memorialized, right? Sure—but there's only one way, when we're talking about TV and the Olympics. Tyler must win the gold. She'll win it for Dad. Silver just doesn't make it a story. Which is why I don't watch the Olympics. I don't really want to listen to the soap-opera part, and I don't really care if one person who happens to be from my country swims across a pool two hundredths of a second faster than a person from some other country. Watching people swim quickly is just not a priority for me.

Anyway, I'm going to go out on a limb here, but it's my blog and I'm just going to fearlessly say it—I think winning a silver medal in the Olympics is nothing to be ashamed of. A person might even feel a little bit proud about it. But I have lots of wacky notions, so you have to consider the source here.