By: Leanne Shapton
At the 2012 Canadian Olympic trials in Montreal, in a break between races, the names of 25 members of the 1980 Olympic swim team were announced. The men and women walked onto the deck and stood in a lineup. Most were in their 50s, looked normal, parental, yet had the posture of former athletes—an assertive gait, a relaxed unselfconsciousness and the subtle self-possession of being in elite company.
They represented an unusual version of the athlete at this reunion: of bad luck, untried talent—though I could imagine their heady past, the reserves of self-esteem that intense training and an Olympic berth bestowed on them nonetheless.
But the moment was sad. Haunted. They were the refugees of circumstance, of crappy political timing, of a strange Cold War stand. The boycott by the USA, Canada and 63 other countries of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow had rendered all their achievements irrelevant on that international stage.
Attending a couple of days of swimming events at the London 2012 Olympics made me think of those overlooked athletes anew. One night, in a number of brief, pre-taped segments shown on the Jumbotrons before finals, various actors and celebrities commented emphatically on their thoughts about the Games. Dame Helen Mirren throatily said something like: “It’s enough just to take part.” We know this, and it is, but it gets lost in a sort of “Podimonium”: the mad fixation on the first-, second- and third-place finishers, and on the medal count. Television graphics automatically highlight the top three places. The starting blocks illuminate red in one, two or three lights, at the touch, indicating the top three finishes. While I’m just as seduced by shiny things as anyone else, I wish there were more focus on the rest of the field. An appreciation of fourth place, of humble 17th, of a solid 45th. Or, in the case of those athletes from 1980, of never.
I had a good seat, very close to the pool during the preliminary session of the sixth day of swimming events. As I ate a sandwich, I watched the movements of the swimmers who have qualified to compete here, but have pretty much no chance of advancing to a semifinal. They are turning in personal bests, are moving from 45th to 40th place, dropping chunks of seconds from their Olympic-trial swims, but these triumphant increments are invisible to us.
Full disclosure: I’ve never been a champion. I can’t speak to the thin air, the loneliness at the top, the pressures of expectation that truly elite athletes can. But I can talk about getting as far, in my training as a competitive swimmer, as consolation and semifinals at Olympic trials. I can speak for the obscure.
With this in mind, I returned to the pool to watch the swimming finals, with an eye to the fourth- through eighth-place qualifiers. The athletes each get a booming introduction as they walk to their block. They each wear variations on their team uniforms, sometimes a tracksuit in the colours of their flag, sometimes a long sleek parka—in the case of China, a big puffy duffle coat. Their stoic close-ups, waves to the crowd and stripping off of their layers are displayed on the Jumbotrons. The cameras then hone in on the top three qualifiers and stay there until the finish. At the end of the races, the five swimmers who don’t medal might roll over the lane lines to congratulate the winners, but usually they simply look at the scoreboard, faces not registering much but exhaustion (a stark contrast to the emotional reactions of the medallists being beamed onto the giant screens), then swim slowly to the side and haul themselves out of the pool. Their moment is over.
On my flight back from London, I reviewed notes I made on the back of heat sheets from the sixth night of swimming finals. Turning the paper over, a few names jump out from the lists of semifinals and final heats. Ryan Lochte, USA. Leisel Jones, AUS. Kosuke Kitajima, JPN. Kirsty Coventry, ZIM. I recognize all of these names, and can even conjure their faces. But the bulk of the names are strange: Arianna Barbieri, ITA; Yuanhui Fu, CHN; Giedrius Titenis, LTU; and Mina Matsushima, JPN. The latter group, though unknown to me, are swimmers whose names strike fear and awe into the hearts of hundreds of their competitors. The mention of their surname in specialized company can elicit an inner bow of assent to the superiority of their talent. These are Olympic finalists, swimmers whose Wikipedia pages tally their previous gold medal wins.
To this day, the relatively unknown name Nancy Sweetnam shuffles me humbly into the insignificant rank and number I knew as a swimmer, age 17. As do the names Lisa Flood, Guylaine Cloutier, Nathalie Giguère. These names loomed more than famous to me. I physically understood them to be—in a sort of animal hierarchy—the strongest of the pack, the alpha wolves. They were fast. I was not. But at the Olympics, the international summit of alpha wolves, the names nobody recognizes are cheered for by small pockets of teammates, countrymen and family, or reduced to well-intentioned mispronunciation. In the pool, they’re literally relegated to the margins—lanes 2, 7, or the gutters, lanes 1 and 8.
In the early heats before the top seeds begin to appear in the middle of the pool, the strange names seemed symbolic cogs in the Olympic machinery. The announcer urges the crowd to cheer on Christian Nassif of the Central African Republic. Wilfried Tevoedjre of Benin. And we do, but abstractly, the way we’d cheer on a horse or someone else’s child. We don’t know their stories, their painful knee operations, their parents’ sacrifices. What are the pools even like in SUD? In CMR? What is DOI?
They are the supporting cast to the fastest qualifiers and finishers. Some of them are understudies to the greatest. I look up the last time Michael Phelps placed out of the top three at an Olympics. It was 12 years ago. In Sydney, he placed fifth in the 200-metre free. It’s interesting to think there was a moment when we might have shrugged, Phelps who? An athlete has deep reserves of patience; a spectator does not.
It’s harder than you think to articulate what you dream of. It’s easy to say: a life partner, a baby, to get married, a promotion. But how many people do you know who are honest about their ambitions and will train years in pursuit of an unpaid position? Have you ever told your friends you want to win a Pulitzer, or an Academy Award? The Olympics engender such ecstatic emotions because they are the one place that sanctions and encourages the admission of pure ambition. In spite of the fear of embarrassment, of failure. These athletes are beyond the point of defending their weird routines. For two weeks their lives are not so small, constricted or painful. Everyone here has fought to be here, everyone here has dreamt of a medal, talked openly about it. Convinced coaches, teammates, families and hometowns to support them. Even if the podium is a pipe dream, an eighth or 48th-place finish means a tremendous amount to all involved, as did Phelps’s fifth place. This kind of obsession is rarely understood outside of sport.
As I watched fourth place and onwards “lose,” I thought of how grateful we should be to those without medals, for giving us completely this privately triumphant and vulnerable moment of theirs to watch. Or, as too often happens, to ignore.
The article originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine.