The Olympics Deserve a Gold Medal

Plus, Bret Stephens on the “steel — and spine“ of Biden at his best

The medals for the 2024 Paris games are seen in this handout photo.

Having covered New York’s bid for the 2012 Olympics and lived through Boston’s bid for the 2024 games, I’m totally familiar with all the arguments against hosting a summer games. The International Olympic Committee is notoriously corrupt. The place that hosts the games can wind up spending huge sums of tax dollars to build “white elephant” special-purpose facilities that are only used for a few weeks. And all to advance some Baron de Coubertin-style naive globalist fantasy of peace through sport.

And yet, watching the Paris games on television these past couple of weeks, I find myself coming around to the idea that there’s quite a bit to admire about the Olympics—the patriotism, the capitalism, the meritocracy.

It may help to account for some of the strength of the ratings that the Olympics are getting on television.

Where else, with the possible exception of a Republican National Convention or the editorial offices of The Editors, is it considered socially acceptable to break out into chants of “U.S.A!, U.S.A!”? It’s no accident that the “Miracle on Ice” of the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics and the American triumphs of the 1984 Los Angeles games coincided with the great resurgence of American pride and patriotism of the Reagan era. The American gymnasts and divers may be offering friendly greetings to the North Korean and Chinese Communist competitors, but when it comes to the medals, the Olympics are a zero-sum competition in which nationalism, rooting for your own country to win, is unapologetically part of the program. The audience members are waving American flags or those of other countries, not banners featuring rainbows, planet earth, or some other universal symbol.

For years the Olympics upheld an ideal of amateurism, which was a pretentious way of saying that the athletes couldn’t be paid, at least overtly. Thank goodness, that’s mostly gone, and the Olympics are fueled, unabashedly, by American capitalism—NBC television money, Polo Ralph Lauren uniforms, Nike logos, NBA professional athletes, the prospect of an athlete eventually making it onto the side of a cereal box.

Then there’s the sheer meritocracy of it. If there are proposals to redistribute the medals evenly among all the countries for “equity” reasons, or to give the slower athletes or those from smaller or poorer countries head starts in the swimming, running, or bicycling events, such proposals haven’t gotten much attention or traction. Everyone seems to accept that people come to the competition with various advantages and disadvantages. Those differences don’t discredit the enterprise; even competitors from rich countries, and even individual athletes with genetic gifts or with parents who are supportive in other ways still need hard work and mental discipline, along with blessings or luck, to succeed. 

The medals are won for results, not effort. Sure, a lot of effort is put in to get the results, but no one is confusing the two things, at least at the Olympics. The judgments about who wins are quantitative and largely objective. The Olympians aren’t writing essays, collecting letters of recommendation, or composing PowerPoint presentations explaining why they deserve a gold medal. Instead they are swimming faster, jumping higher, or scoring more points than someone else or some other team. 

Somehow, nowadays all that seems rare, almost refreshing. Countercultural, even. Whether the taxpayers of Paris are better off because of the Olympics, I don’t know. And sure, there will always be scandals involving performance-enhancing drugs or crooked judges. But surely it’s good for the world and for America to have a widely watched competition where there’s an absolute, nonarbitrary standard of excellence. For that, the Olympics themselves deserve a gold medal.

SmarterTimes: Bret Stephens’s New York Times column today has this paragraph: “At his best, Biden provided the steel — and spine — that helped Ukraine fend off Russia’s invasion. He did so again by bringing Finland and Sweden into NATO, deterring Hezbollah from invading northern Israel after Oct. 7, deepening military alliances throughout the Pacific and promising to fight for Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion.”

“Biden provided the steel — and spine — that helped Ukraine fend off Russia’s invasion”? The invasion hasn’t been fended off; Russia still controls substantial portions of Ukraine, and Russia went in to begin with because it sensed American weakness. 

“Deterring Hezbollah from invading northern Israel after Oct. 7”? Hezbollah has been consistently attacking Israel with drones, missiles, and rockets since October 8, to the point where Israel has evacuated between 60,000 and 80,000 people from towns, cities, and villages in Northern Israel for their own safety. Hezbollah killed a dozen Druze in an attack last month in Majdal Shams. The American naval presence has been helpful, but to bill this as a some kind of success of Biden steeliness or spinefulness is way too generous to Biden. Israel has been deterring Hezbollah by massing forces in the north to repel a potential invasion and possibly to push Hezbollah back further into Lebanon over the Litani River. The Israeli Air Force has been eliminating Hezbollah leaders with targeted strikes. If there were serious American steel, spine, and genuine deterrence, Israelis would be in their own homes in the north rather than refugees in their own country. I’m not even sure “deterrence” is a particularly applicable concept with Hezbollah or other groups that aspire to martyrdom. But to the extent that it is, the current situation in northern Israel falls significantly short of a textbook example.

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