Citius, Altius, Fortius

“Citius, Altius, Fortius” (“Faster, Higher, Stronger”) - Olympic Motto, Father Henri Martin Didon

Yes, I am an Olympics junkie. I have been in Nirvana for the last two weeks as I revisit the wonders of the Nordic combined, half-pipe, skeleton, short program, and best of all - curling! I am perfectly willing to sit glassy-eyed in front of the tube, evening after evening, breathlessly waiting for the big hill ski jumper from Kazakhstan to hit his telemark landing on his third and final jump to the roar of a crowd of, say, 50 to 60 very cold spectators.

Equally odd is that the rest of the time, I wouldn’t be caught dead watching a couple ice dancing to the music of Love Story, dressed in something out of John Phillip Sousa’s worst nightmare. I couldn’t tell you who the reigning world champion is in any sport requiring snow or ice, let alone who is America’s best at anything remotely related to winter sports and skin tight sequined suits. I can tell you, however, where this odd, every-four-year obsession of mine originated from: the convergence of a world-wide sports event with that great world-wide media, television.

I was 11 years old in 1968 - a pretty memorable year for many folks, but on a personal level it was the year I discovered two gloriously flawed cultural icons in my life: The Olympics and color television!!!

Now don’t get me wrong, I didn’t grow up in a cave; a television was part of my consciousness almost as far back as I can remember. I can still see John F. Kennedy’s funeral and The Beatles on Ed Sullivan as clearly as anything, but for me, those images will be forever etched in black and white. I grew up in a black and white world as far as media was concerned, with the exception of the glorious full color of Life Magazine every Friday, so I suppose pageantry and pomp and hoopla would always leave me a bit cold. But sometime in the fall of 1967 my neighbors got the most magnificent machine I had every beheld - a Zenith (I still remember the brand!) color TV! It was about the size of a davenport, as I recall, and featured lots of cabinetry and knobs and fabric, and took about ten minutes to warm up, BUT IT WAS A COLOR TV! I worked hard to find excuses to hang around and get a glimpse of the Holy Grail-like appliance, but back then children were expected to be able to occupy themselves without the electronic babysitter, and besides, there was that issue of the radiation from the color tube cooking your eyeballs to little cinders if you watched for more than a few minutes at a time. Watching color TV for more than, say, an hour at a time was considered to be just one step below staring at the noontime sun. Then it would be, “Outside, kids! It’s only 20-below out there, it’s good for you!” Plus the networks hadn’t really gotten programming for 11 year old boys down yet. Kid’s shows were lame and parents tended to dominate primetime with junk like Gunsmoke, and Father Knows Best…yuck!

But as February rolled around that year, my neighbors told my parents that they were going out of town for the unheard-of span of two weeks - and they needed my brother and I to “check on the house and the pets while we’re gone, and if they want to watch a little of the TV, that’s OK too….” Needless to say, we jumped at the idea, and a few days later we were ensconced on their couch in full winter gear (the neighbors insisted the heat be kept very low during their absence), watching Charles de Gaulle preside over the opening ceremonies of the 1968 Winter Olympic Games from Grenoble, France in living (if somewhat fuzzy) color. Over the next week or so, we thrilled to the heroics of Jean-Claude Killy in alpine skiing and were smitten with figure skater Peggy Fleming, who won America’s only gold medal. Apparently we weren’t the only ones who were swept up by the 1968 Winter Olympics, because the combination of the first satellite broadcast of a live sports event and the first color broadcast of an Olympics has been identified by scholars as the beginning of the world’s infatuation with all things Olympic.

All I know is that, from that moment on, my brother and I were hooked. Unexpectedly, the Olympics have provided me with life lessons ever since, and while not all of them have been pleasant, they have been important. Tommy Smith and John Carlos’s black power salute during the medal ceremony that very summer in Mexico City would raise my awareness of issues regarding race and human rights. In 1972, my brother and I sat in stunned horror as the terrorist age dawned on live TV in Munich. In 1980, I vividly remember trying to tune in the USA vs. Russia hockey game on the AM radio in my old Ford Maverick while driving in central Ohio on a snowy night. I rounded a hill and picked up the last few minutes of the biggest victory of what would become the “Miracle on Ice.” Politics reached frenzied levels in the 1980 and ‘84 Olympics, when boycotting seemed to be all the rage and became something I could only lament as a great concept dragged into the mud. The non-sport related happenings have continued, but they don’t tarnish the central concept for me. Now I know that at some level the Olympics are certainly political, and that I often measured great triumphs and disappointments in terms of whether we won or lost. But that boy in me who was thrilled in 1968 still likes to believe in the principle at the heart of it all - competing together as brothers and sisters regardless of language or cultural barriers - and I still stop what’s going on in my world to take it all in. I still see it in all its bright and shining colors.

Have a great week!