Fourteen gold medals! Granted, the medal inflation to which William Watson the economist drew attention in these pages yesterday, but: 14 gold medals!
I shall remember the Vancouver Winter Olympics not for anything that happened there, except a couple of hockey games. And even those at one remove, for I caught only glimpses in Internet feeds, and missed some of the good bits when my server started glitching. (This is something we seldom had to cope with in the non-interactive television days; are we sure technology is improving?)
“We came out with that physical edge right away,” said Corey Perry of the Canadian effort against Russia, our traditional rival in the match of blades.
But I preferred the way a Russian goalie put it. “They came like gorillas coming out of a cage,” said Ilya Bryzgalov, in a remark whose English cannot be improved. He was being, if possible, even more generous than the colleague who let in six Canadian goals before the game was half over.
Something I remember most happily from the 1972 Canada-Soviet series—a formative patriotic experience—was the degree to which we became acquainted with individual Russian players, through eight games. The British respect for Rommel in North Africa was of a kind with the admiration we formed for such as Valery Kharlamov, Alexander Maltsev, and especially Vladislav Tretiak (of whom we caught another glimpse, on a stage in Vancouver). Or have just acquired for the American, Ryan Miller. What magnificent players!
This is something that is lost, though not entirely, in our “boy culture,” as the agents of political correctness slap down hard on male rivalries in a public school system designed to encourage female success and male failure. Generosity is built into the heart of it, and the kind of friendship that grows between true rivals—in hockey, in math, in literature, even in politics—is such as some women will never understand.
I have seen it in the most extraordinary forms; in for instance the friendship between two men who were rivals for the love of the same woman. Only one of them could win her hand (I put this in the old-fashioned way, because all honest rivalries are old-fashioned).
Yet in the competition for a woman’s heart, two men may discover common depths in their own hearts.
Of course I do not speak for women, and indeed would rather not, from what I could see of the Olympics. There is something equivalent in female rivalries, but at the least, the “atmospherics” are much different. Women in their nature must be so generous with respect to their own children, that in a sense they cannot afford to be generous like men “towards the world.”
More, much more, could be said on this, but not publicly, which compels us to silence if we cannot repeat the socially-acceptable big lies. Suffice to say, the universe of difference between the sexes is if possible even more apparent under Olympic conditions, where, in many of the events, women are competing as ersatz men.
We may readily concede that much of this is culturally determined. An op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times by Efraim Karsh, the historian of Islam, drew attention to the cancellation of the Islamic Solidarity Games, which were to be held in Iran this April. A history of that movement, intended to annex and adapt the very western Olympic ideal, is instructive.
Even within former Christendom, the characteristically barbaric outburst by the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, when his team failed to bring home enough medals, is a reminder of the degree to which a raw and ugly jingo nationalism has infected a competition that was originally intended to highlight individual athletic achievement, across political and cultural boundaries.
Yet the Olympics can cross such boundaries even at the level of crude nationalism.
My ineradicable memory from the Games will be of a very sober-looking Punjabi lady in a Sikh grocery, counting up my purchases of ragi, ajwain seeds, and mathri snacks in the early moments of the final Canada-U.S. game, which was playing on a television in the background.
Suddenly the Canadians scored their first goal. The lady lost count, and dropped a plastic bag. A wild look came over her face, and she shouted: “Canada! Canada!”
This was among the finest “multicultural moments” I have experienced. We should never forget the zeal a recent immigrant may have for her adopted country: the zeal of a convert.
There is nothing wrong with cheering for Canada; with true patriot love for our own. It has its rightful place in the order of all human attachments. It becomes wrong only when we forget that others rightfully share in this gift, who are sons and daughters of other lands. And that the gift itself is something that binds us, across every frontier.
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