Medal Head
The Olympics are an outdated, flawed, and generally problematic institution — that we can’t help but love anyway
MY FIRST OLYMPIC MEMORY ISN’T OF athletic glory, patriotic fervour, or even of warring nations brought together in the glow of the Olympic flame, united by the universalizing power of physical competition. It’s a memory of crushing, abject disappointment. One afternoon when I was in Grade One, the voice of the principal of my downtown Toronto elementary school came on over the PA system. In a grave tone, he told the school the news: “Ben Johnson has been stripped of his gold medal.” I can’t recall exactly what happened next. Was the teacher forced to explain what steroids were to a bunch of six year olds? I just remember the sense of gloom. We weren’t asked to take a moment of silence, but it felt like a death.
This was, I’m fairly certain, the only time class was ever interrupted for an announcement about an athlete failing a PED test. Such is the power of the Olympics, a mammoth sporting event so all-encompassing that the victories and the disgraces demand public conversation, even at an elementary school. A few years later, while running the 800 metres at a city track meet, I remember looking out into the stands. In one of the top rows of the bleachers, away from the school children and screaming parents, sat Ben Johnson, silent and alone. I don’t know why he was watching a bunch of kids run around the track. Maybe just because he still loved the sport from which he’d been banned for life, and a city track meet was as close as he could get.
To me, the rise, fall, and drawnout humiliation of Ben Johnson has remained an enduring symbol of the Olympics — a brief moment of althletic brilliance and excitement entirely surrounded by a morass of corruption and disappointment. If all sports are torn between uplifting narratives of glory and the icky realities of mass-marketed competition, the Olympics remain the champions: faster, higher, stronger, more maddeningly hypocritical.
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IN ALL THE OBVIOUS WAYS, LOVING the Olympics is the easiest thing in the world. You get to see the fastest, strongest humans in existence. You hear a