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Strong women
I’ve never been one to follow professional sports too closely, and the nationalism and politics of the Olympic Games has always felt a little too forced for me. Generally, I’m the type to dread the biennial two-week stretch when the news is overtaken by dramatic stories from the lives of extraordinary people.
This year, in the weeks leading up to the games, the news was flooded with stories of doping scandals—the Russians’ cold-war-esque attempt to dominate Olympic glory by chemically enhancing their athletes and running an elaborate, government- run scheme to fudge their test results.
The over-priced, over-hyped events seem to highlight corruption and ruin in the venues, the cities and the countries where they’re hosted, despite attention desperately being called away from the negative and toward the warm and fuzzy.
In Brazil, stories of the extreme hardships endured by those who worked on building the Olympic venues, along with the extreme poverty and political corruption in the country are bubbling up, despite attempts to drown them out with stories of young athletes overcoming adversity to become the best in their disciplines.
And in the end, these are groups of extraordinary athletes competing under a flag because they happened to be born in that country, or live there, or have simply been funded by that government to train.
And, of course, the more money a country puts into sport, the more athletes they can send to the Olympics, with more training in better facilities.
Their feats may be impressive. They are some of the fastest, strongest, most skilled people in the world. But to cheer for any athlete because of the flag they wear seems, to me, absurd.
But this year, I’m a little torn.
Of course, I pay enough attention to notice Canada has already earned more than a dozen medals. And while this doesn’t make me more proud of Canada, I can’t help but smile when I notice that, apart from Andre De Grasse’s bronze medal in the men’s 100 metre sprint, all the medal winners have been women.
In more regularly scheduled sports, it seems, women get short shrift. The team sports we hear about, the players who make the most money, the most-watched athletes are almost exclusively men.
So to see six medals go to Canadian swimmers— all women—and to the Canadian women’s rugby team makes me feel a twinge of pride, though I have no connection to these women or their sports.
To hear sportscasters refer to the Canadian women’s soccer team as simply Canada’s soccer team—no qualifier necessary, because the Canadian men’s soccer team didn’t even qualify—lifts my spirits, and I find myself silently cheering them on.
No, it still seems odd to me to cheer for athletes just because they’re Canadian. But for some reason, cheering for Canadian women feels different. Maybe I’m more easily sucked in than I thought. You go, girls!
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