As the Games in Vancouver draw to a close, one can’t help but pause and reflect on what made these games, and indeed all Winter Olympic Games, the greatest that sport can offer.
Set into majestic mountain lairs, framed in cloud and sun like heaven itself, the Winter Games are more than mere sport; they are the best young women and men that the world has on offer. Not mere athletes that trod the ground like a herd of heifers, as in the Summer Games (except for swimming, which has the same other-worldly, godlike aura as the Winter Games), the sleek and lithe gods and goddesses of the Winter Games defy death itself on their ski edges and blade edges. They complete cross country ski races that would humiliate the best marathon runner. They launch their glorious bodies into the air – eagle-like – and fly down the mountainside as the Valkyries herself.
And the faces of these athletes: warm, intelligent, and open; quick with a supportive word to any foe, quiet and restrained in their victories, No primitive chest-thumping or arm-pumping after a victory in the Winter Games. These athletes comport themselves in the civilized manner that is the essence of the Olympic Game itself.
And let us now turn and give praise to our Korean, Japanese, and Chinese brothers and sisters. They have taken our breath away with their skill and development in ice skating and speed skating – showing once again that it is focus of heart, mind, discipline, and intelligence that creates Winter Olympic champions, not the color of one’s skin or the place of one’s birth.