The Redemptive Benefits of the Olympics

In spite of all their costs and complications

Every morning this week I’ve felt like something’s missing from my morning routine. After praying and making coffee, I check my email, play Wordle, turn on the TV, and… realize that the Olympics aren’t there anymore!

For more than two weeks, my son and I delighted in starting the day by taking advantage of our Peacock subscription and sampling a different Olympic event. Sometimes we had the chance to learn the skills and strategy of sports obscure to Americans, like team handball, field hockey, and rugby. Other mornings we got to enjoy competition on impossibly memorable French stages: beach volleyball in front of the Eiffel Tower, taekwando inside the Grand Palais, a cross-country equestrian race across the gardens of Versailles.

If we missed anything during the day, we’d join historically large audiences and watch evening replays of signature events like swimming, track, and gymnastics, thrilling to the achievements of stars like Katie Ledecky and Léon Marchand, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and Sifan Hassan, and Simone Biles and Rebeca Andrade.

There’s nothing like the Olympics to remind me how much I enjoy sports… or to make me feel guilty for that enjoyment.

You see, I couldn’t help thinking about one of the books that we taught this past spring in Bethel’s History and Politics of Sports course: Jules Boykoff’s sometimes caustic political history of the Modern Olympics, Power Games.