I was a messy Olympics fan. During the Games in Paris, I rooted for several national delegations. As I was born in the Philippines, I cheered for the Filipinos. I am ethnic Chinese, so I was thrilled by the achievements of China, Hong Kong and, um, Chinese Taipei. I am an US citizen, so I was happy when Team USA is No. 1 (or 2 or 3). I live in London, so whenever the UK medaled, I experienced frissons of delight.
I also found myself celebrating when these categories blended together, say, the triathlon gold going to the UK’s Alex Yee, the son of an overseas Chinese father and an English mother. Or when I heard that the most decorated member of the US fencing team, Lee Kiefer, has a Filipino immigrant mother. Then there was that scene after the men’s gymnastics floor exercise where the Philippines’ Carlos Yulo, who won gold, shared the podium with the UK’s Jake Jarman, who took the bronze and whose mother is from Cebu, in the central part of my native archipelago.
However, I also cheered for the nations that medaled for the first time in Olympic history: Cape Verde, Dominica and Saint Lucia. Botswana won its first gold ever when sprinter Letsile Tebogo beat out US superstars Kenny Bednarek and Noah Lyles in the men’s 200m sprint. I also cheered for the rising powers that have yet to reflect that status fully at the Olympics, such as India, Nigeria, Pakistan and Indonesia. Especially moving are tales such as the Pakistani village that raised the money for its native son Arshad Nadeem to train for what would be a momentous gold medal in javelin.
Illustration: Mountain People
There is a kind of satisfaction that comes to everyone when countries unused to athletic achievement notch precedent-setting victories — a joy as heartfelt as national and ethnic pride.
However, while cheers and huzzahs might sound alike, they all come from different parts of the heart. Some Web sites, for example, reranked the top 10 medaling countries by distributing the medals per capita.
I suspect an Antipodean hand in that, because heading into the final weekend by that measure, Australia was No. 1, followed by the Netherlands, France, the UK and South Korea, relegating the two big Olympic superpowers, the US and China, to seventh and 10th respectively.
A more judicious use of the parameter would reorder not just the top 10 medal winners, but all participating nations. The top five spots would then go to Grenada, Dominica, Saint Lucia, New Zealand and Jamaica. It is not as if Australia needs more boosting: It came in at No. 4 behind the US, China and Japan in the final medal standings that is determined by golds.
In any case, prizes are won by individual humans (or groups of humans who have trained together as a team), not by anonymous parcels of the population.
It is one thing to take pride in people from your country or ethnic group. It is another to insinuate that victory is evidence of some kind of broader superiority.
Patriotic prejudice is one thing, but I also have to catch myself when I applaud victories of people who are part-Filipino or part-Chinese and hold other citizenship. What exactly am I cheering? An Olympic medal justifying some nebulous race-based advantage?
The Olympics have been a way for once-downtrodden countries to emerge from histories as 100-pound weaklings: Nation-building by way of bodybuilding, so to speak.
Most recently, China boosted its self-esteem with a sports prowess to match its economic renaissance. However, even that did not come overnight. The country has been part of the Olympic movement for decades, but it only won its first gold medal in 1984 in Los Angeles.
The national medal rankings of each Summer Olympics can be less impressive than they appear. The Los Angeles Games, for example, were marked by the absence of the Soviet Union (tit-for-tat, because the US boycotted the Moscow Games in 1980). This year’s Paris Games did not see the participation of Russia. Who knows what the standings in track and gymnastics would have been if Moscow had not been banned because of its invasion of Ukraine.
As my colleague Karishma Vaswani writes, the Chinese — in the middle of trying economic times — are wondering if their government is spending too much money on athletics. Gold medals, though, are proof that developing countries, too, can have first-world problems.
It is good to have a sense of humor about physical prowess and victory. The Indian-American stand-up comic Zarna Garg joked about her homeland’s paucity of gold medals.
“So the two big sports for Indians at the Olympics? Shooting and archery,” she says. “What do shooting and archery have in common? You don’t move. I make breakfast for my family and I move more than those guys.”
That might all change in 2028 when an “Indian” sport becomes part of the next Summer Games in Los Angeles. Cricket, anyone?
Howard Chua-Eoan is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion covering culture and business. He previously served as Bloomberg Opinion’s international editor and is a former news director at Time magazine.
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