The Olympics and man's search for meaning

These rings represent the infinite nature of being, or something.

Everyone knows that the Olympics derive their name from Mt. Olympus, the home of the gods in Greco-Roman mythology. The symbolism has always been clear: The Olympians we see at the games are the gods among us, pushing the human body far beyond what is possible for us mere mortals. This, indeed, they do. (Especially if they're American.) But our modern-day Olympians are, for all their incredible feats, only human, which makes their accomplishments all the more impressive. (Though not as impressive as Captain America.) And the contest in which they vie against their fellow deities is not some eternal afterlife, an athletes' Valhalla. It is, rather, an acute, hyper-real, adrenaline-and-sweat-soaked two weeks or so, after which every participant returns to reality.

Except Usain Bolt. He's clearly a god.

And so it goes for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, now officially over after last night's closing ceremonies. After hosting a two-week convergence of the world's greatest athletes (which it probably shouldn't have done in the first place), Rio will soon empty of its Olympic athletes, coaches, media, and spectators. We in the rest of the world who could only watch these incredible physical specimens vie for the immortality of Olympic medals turn to other things. Yet the athletes will leave behind more than Olympic infrastructure that may or may not ever again be used after the Games.

This abandoned venue from the 1984 Sarajevo winter Olympics was later used as an execution site during a war.

As these demigods come down from Mt. Olympus after the two-week adrenaline rush of the Olympics and return to their lives, many will start training and more competing, after (let us hope) some rest, ready to go the distance for Tokyo 2020 (and the potential weirdness it will entail). For others, Rio was their last Olympics. But every Olympian, whether first-time competitor or veteran, whether returning home festooned with medals or with naught but empty hands and unmet expectations, will be at risk for post-Olympic depression:

This emotional drop, in its most acute form, might be called post-Olympic depression—or, to borrow a phrase from the sports psychologist Scott Goldman, the director of the Performance Psychology Center at the University of Michigan, an under-recovery. “Think about the rollercoaster ride prior to the Olympics, and just how fast and hectic that mad dash is,” Goldman says. “This ninety-mile-per-hour or hundred-mile-per-hour ride comes to a screeching halt the second the Olympics are over. … [The athletes] are just exhausted; it was such an onslaught to their system. And when it’s all said and done, they’re just physiologically depleted, as well as psychologically.”

This is completely understandable. Imagine spending years, or, in many cases, an entire lifetime preparing for a single two-week span, or, in many cases, a single moment or collection of moments. How would you feel after that moment had passed? As an amateur athlete myself, I can relate to this to some extent. Though high school and college cross country aren't quite the Olympics, after I completed my last high school and college cross country races, after years of focus, training, and sacrifice led up to a single event that was now irretrievably in the past, I think I felt something like that. That elect fraternity of Moon-visiting astronauts have reported a similar feeling upon returning to Earth. And surely the Hobbits of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy felt something like it when they returned to the Shire after their long journey:


The article quoted above - definitely worth a full read - goes into more detail about Olympians themselves. Even those who have reasonable expectations of going to another Olympics find it difficult to readjust to "normal" life. And those whose for whom the passage of time and the weight of toil have made returning to the Olympics as unrealistic as going in the first place ever was for me (alas) find it difficult to live normal lives at all. One Olympian, multiple gold-medalist swimmer Mark Spitz (the Phelps before Phelps), even attempted to return to the Olympics in his early 40s. (He was unsuccessful.) These paragons of discipline and fortitude in the sport they have mastered have so sequestered their lives that they have to learn how to apply their Olympic hyper-virtues to life's quotidian aspects.

Although Olympians are quite different from you and me (unless someone reading this is an Olympian; in which case, congratulations, and thanks for reading! Any advice how I can transform myself from a slightly above-average post-collegiate distance runner into an Olympic-qualifying distance runner? Or can you at least get me tickets for Tokyo 2020?), there is something universal about this experience. We all go through periods of intense, purpose-driven existence. And we all also go through periods of confusing, meaning-absent existence, wondering what to do next, or whether to do anything at all. The Olympics is an intensifier of this, compressing years of purpose into moments of execution, and stretching moments of goal-achievement over years of preparation. The intensity of the experience echoes a universal truth expressed in one of my favorite poems: Tennyson's "Ulysses":

"Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!”

There is something profoundly human, moreover, in the simple Olympian desire to win. Sure, competition is thrilling, becoming the very best - like no one ever was - is rewarding, and winning is nice. For many Olympians (such as, say, Ryan Lochte, who clearly evolved to minimize his brain's weight for maximum swimming speed), just winning is probably enough. But all glory is fleeting. What I think these Olympians truly seek, whether unconsciously or consciously, is reassurance that their efforts and achievements will have been neither wasted nor forgotten. They fight, as we all do, against the cold finality of unbeing. They compete, as we all do, against the oblivion of time's passage that threatens to erase from memory even the greatest among us. They strive, as we all do, to leave some indelible mark on history, so that they can say to ages to come "yes, I was there."

As godlike as Olympians are, nothing could be more human than that.