SportsLit goes to the Summer Games

Ugly underbelly of IOC and FIFA aside, chats with Donovan Bailey, Perdita Felicien, Spencer Haywood, Corey Hirsch, Ted Nolan, Manon Rhéaume and Suzy Wrack, et al., aver that sports are pretty good.

“Every four years.” (20th Century Fox / Frinkiac)

Quitting the Olympics is easy; you have probably done it 1,000 times. It probably comes down to moving the mental sliders to the optimal point where the right amount of being for the athletes and their contributions to the perspiring arts; while also making space to slug down the black comedy of it all through the filter of active critical distancing.

I love sports. Sporty sports sports.

I hope athletes repping Canada can win about 20 medals, and we can finally retire the whole “win/earn” a bronze or silver, and the “can be medalled be a verb” memes.¹ With Paris 2024, the Olympics and Paralympics, coming up faster than Dave Wottle in Munich in ’72, a purpose in writing was to share some of SportsLit’s podisodes that have featured Olympians, or authors who have covered multiple Olympics.

I will let you get to the good stuff. There are some diaristic thoughts down below.²

Over the last 6¾ years, SportsLit co-creator and producer extraordinaire Neil Acharya and I have read and discussed a few books that range into the Olympics sphere.

In alphabetical order:

The great double gold medallist Donovan Bailey discussed Undisputed: A Champion’s Life with us in 2023. We got’er done in world record time.

Bryan Berard, who overcame being blinded in one eye to make a return to the NHL, was on the United States Olympic hockey team in Nagano in 1998. For pod purposes, Berard gave SportsLit a big assist in early 2020 by being the first NHL alumnus to discuss his autobiography.

Morgan Campbell, who is part of the CBC Olympics team in Paris, appeared to discuss My Fighting Family: Borders and Bloodlines and the Battles That Made Us.

Perdita Felicien is also part of the CBC Olympics team, and she is an Olympics alumna and two-time world hurdles champion. Ever since Felicien was a guest in 2021, I have tried to remember the tip she received from her mum, Catherine (Caity) Browne: ‘Don’t fill your life with foolishness.’ You should read Felicien’s memoir My Mother’s Daughter: A Memoir of Struggle and Triumph.

Basketball Hall of Fame inductee Spencer Haywood took the NBA to the Supreme Court in 1971 so he could play in the league. The 1968 Olympics basketball gold medallist, who led Team USA in scoring, examined his battles in The Spencer Haywood Rule: Battles, Basketball and the Making of an American Iconoclast.

They say never meet your heroes! Au contraire, mes amis! Getting to talk to a media pro with the stature and thoughtfulness of Mark Hebscher for the 2019 première was awesome. Hebscher authored The Greatest Athlete You’ve Never Heard Of, a bio of multitalented George Washington Orton, the first Canadian to win an Olympic event — although no one knew it, because Canada.

Also, yeah, the first Canadian Olympic champion was named after the Father of the United States. Which… tracks.

Goaltending-fraternity member and mental health advocate Corey Hirsch won a silver medal with Canada at the 1994 Olympics. The NHL alumnus wrote about his management of pure-O obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) diagnosis in The Save of My Life: My Journey out of the Dark.

Sports Illustrated alumnus Jack McCallum wrote a book about the 1992 United States dream team, of course. He also spent a season embedded with the Steve Nash-era Phoenix Suns for his book Seven Seconds Or Less. For our show, we read McCallum’s The Real Hoosiers, about the Crispus Attucks Tigers and a young Oscar Robertson. “The Big O” was integral to the U.S. winning the 1960 men’s basketball gold medal.

Hockey coach and humanitarian Ted Nolan coached Latvia in the 2014 Olympics men’s hockey tournament. Nolan published Life In Two Worlds: A Coach’s Journey from the Reserve to the NHL and Back.

Doping is a reality of the Olympics. See those Chinese swimmers. Or know that we can never be too sure that any sprinting champion of the last 20 years has been clean.

What does it do to a champion who gets pinched when others escape a Day of the Locusts treatment? Mary Ormsby examined that in World’s Fastest Man*: The Life of Ben Johnson.

Manon Rhéaume won a silver medal with Canada at the inaugural 1998 Olympic women’s hockey tournament. Rhéaume related her experience as the first woman to play in an NHL game when she and Angie Bullaro co-wrote a children’s book, Breaking The Ice (published in French as Briser la glace).

Barrie Shepley is one of the drivers in triathlon attaining Olympic status. He was the coach of Simon Whitfield, the Kingstonian who won the first men’s gold medal in Sydney in 2000. Shepley published a memoir, Chasing Greatness, in ’22.

Longtime Toronto-based sportswriter Steve Simmons is set to cover his 18th Olympics. We asked him about that, and a lot of other stuff in a wide-ranging conversation in fall 2022. His book is a compendium of best-of columns, and the one that heavily shaded the poorly run 1992 Albertville Olympics stands up very well.

Sami Jo Small was in the goalie room with Team Canada through three Olympics cycles, including the gold-winning 2002 and ’06 teams. Her spouse, Billy Bridges, is a three-time Paralympics medallist in sledge hockey. Small wrote, honestly gushing, a great memoir called The Role I Played.

The Olympic stage has been a big platform in the rise of WoSo, or women’s soccer — still not ready to talk about that Canada-U.S. game at London 2012. The same goes for having Sweden at 10-to-1 to win gold in Tokyo, and then Canada beat the Swedes on penalties. Anyway, Suzy Wrack was on our 2022 finale after we read her a book A Women’s Game: The Rise, Fall Again, and Rise of Women’s Soccer.

The Olympic dilemma…

There is acceptance that this is the way it has to be for Olympic-sphere pro athletes.

Many great humans have their livelihoods, dreams, and life arcs wired into an institution that puts the lie to its stated ideals. They fear losing a home, a car, and opportunities for their children without the scale of the Olympics being Appointment Viewing during the summer bad-TV period. None of that sport apparatus can happen without a sorting exercise for the corporate sponsors. Those include fossil-fuel firms whose advertisements need to be phased out, like the public once did with tobacco. Dr. Madeleine Orr brings up this concept of “social licensing” by Big Oil in Warming Up.

But there is no killing off the Olympics. Viewership metrics comparing the Olympics to world championships — even though it’s the same athletes at the worlds, often having better and deeper fields — will back this up. So it goes.

This time around, there is more than enough to turn off this Gliberal-humanist sports geek. A third of China’s swimming roster are OK to compete despite testing positive for the same banned heart medicine and their results were suppressed for almost three years. Host nation France is violating the Olympic charter by banning “women in hijab (an Islamic headscarf) from participating in sport”; so much for respecting that feminism is about the choice and respecting the choice, irrespective of whether you understand it.

C’est la vie. Everyone is brazening their way through something until it is normalized.

Then there is the absolute turtling by FIFA and IOC in welcoming Apartheid Israel, a rogue state. As you likely saw, on July 19 the International Court of Justice — sorry, apologists! — called on Israel to get out of the Palestinian occupied territories, including Gaza. Scoreboard-wise, that non-binding call came from 15 judges who heard from Palestine and 49 other nations. Israel did not even send a legal team to contest the contentions; it replied in writing. And this was not even about the current escalation in response to Hamas’s mindless attack on Oct. 7, 2023. The complaints were filed in late 2022.

It came on the heels of the finding by The Lancet about the vastly underestimated death toll in Gaza over the last nine months. Humanitarian surgeons Drs. Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa also gave an on-the-ground perspective in Politico the day of the ICJ ruling. While their volunteer work puts them “on intimate terms with death and carnage and despair … None of that prepared us for what we saw in Gaza this spring.” Did anyone from FIFA get Coles Notes on that?

So, the FIFA council was supposed to discuss sanctions against Israel on July 20. This organization once banned apartheid South Africa for three-plus decades. But, since Nothing Can Disrupt The Games, and The Games Must Be Peaceful, and perhaps since Sponsors Do Business In Israel, FIFA kicked the decision ahead until after the Olympics, and Israel has the greenlight.

Russia was suspended for engaging in war in Ukraine, remember.

Whelp, good thing I already have a thought bubble of how the IOC and FIFA sleep at night. And cripes, one has barely mentioned that climate denialism pervades the Olympics-industrial complex. Thankfully, aforementioned Dr. Orr has addressed that here, there, and everywhere, including SportsLit.

Damn it, though, there is so much good in the power of sport, as a social connector, as something that makes the world cozier and kinder. A lot of good sports memories from the last 40 years are tied up in watching the Olympics.

The greys of adult reality, and resolute commitment to pacificism and inclusion, should be on the front foot. Push back feeling vicariously valiant when a nation’s athletes win medals, or high-dudgeon disappointed when they do not, since results-based thinking creates problems. Those elements must share space at the same table, and Big Sport needs to be the one asking how it can adapt to a moral-ethical framework.

(Yeah. Surrrre.)

The active critical distancing principle, means you watch the stuff you want to watch. I suppose I am a small Games guy — thank goodness it’s not up to me, or the Summer Olympics would be some team sports, track and field, aquatics, canoe-kayak, combat sports, weightlifting, and enduro-sports such as triathlon. The baseline might be the Darryl Philbin Principle: if it seems too much like something white people with dreadlocks do, get rid of it. And if it involves horses, get rid of it.

I’ll watch the track and field, and the swimming. I have some stoke for basketball, as a longtime Canada Basketball diehard who hard-stans the international game. It is exciting when a young nation gets an opportunity.

An Ottawa baller, Marial Shayok, is hooping for the Bright Stars, the South Sudan men’s basketball team. That has been amazing to see, and I suppose you won’t believe me that I typed this out on a Saturday morning, before he scored a game-high 24 points, on 75 percent true shooting,³ in South Sudan’s near-upset of the United States in pre-Olympic tune-up play.

The South Sudan national team’s acceptance started eight years ago at an Indigenous basketball tournament in Vancouver. While admittedly glossing over the politics and imperfect fallout from the seven-year civil war, the fact they have held it together sufficiently well to be on the Olympic basketball floor offers some hope, eh? A fraction coalition is still a coalition, and that beats ethnography and ethno-tribalism. There are exceptions to any rule, but when does ethno-tribalism ever end well?

There is an indirect lesson in that. One wants that for nations trying to be recognized. I am pulling hard for the Haudenosaunee Nationals to be part of lacrosse’s Olympic comeback in Los Angeles in 2028.⁴ It would not be a real lacrosse tournament without a team wearing the purple of the Haudenosaunee, whose traditional territory encompasses the city where I reside.

One wants nations that were there once to remember what that was like. As a friend says, do not become what you detest.

That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind — especially to yourself.

July 20-23, 2024
Hamilton, Ont.

1. I have an opinion on this: I don’t care. Fine, yes, an athlete wins a silver or bronze medal. Those are the second and third prizes in a contest of skill. “Medalled” as a verb is lazy but acceptable when the commentator simply need say “they hope to win a medal.”

2. Or diarrheal, one supposes.

3. True shooting percentage is a player’s point total, divided by two, into number of total field goal attempts. In that narrow 101-100 victory for the U.S., Shayok scored his 24 points on 16 shots. He was 9-of-16 overall, including 6-of-12 on triple-tries.

4. Men’s lacrosse, with three teams, was included in the shambolic 1904 St. Louis Olympics.