These Olympics Are Not a Shelter – By Alex Kirshner (Slate) / February 9, 2022
The rationalizing and compartmentalizing that sports tend to require isn’t working this time.
Sports were never a durable shelter from the world for anyone who wasn’t privileged enough, or naïve enough, to turn them into one. Every game fits into the world it inhabits, for good or ill. The Olympics are even more enmeshed in the rest of the world than other sporting events, as evidenced by the massive political operations that go into landing them for host countries in the first place, the flags that fly all over them, and the nationalistic scenes they create. Maybe the most remembered Winter Olympic moment in U.S. history, the 1980 Miracle on Ice, gained its stature in significant part because the Americans got one over on the Soviet Union amid the Cold War.
Sports do build their own bubbles, though, vulnerable as they might be to popping under scrutiny. Part of the experience of appreciating them is to acknowledge them in their totality. Some traits are good, like the community sports create, the entertainment they provide, and the lives they can help build. Others are bad, like stadium-financing grifts, injuries to players, and the games becoming reputation-laundering tools for unsavory actors.
Maybe the best way to think of sports, most of the time, is not as a lasting insulation from the world, but as a little tent that provides some cover for as long as circumstance allows. The world is right there, but the good and bad of sports push and pull, and sports fans find equilibrium somewhere that lets us keep watching, because it’s fun and we like sports. The survival of a given sport depends on millions of people making roughly that choice—to keep plowing attention into the NFL, for instance, despite the league’s horrid owners, its racism, its lionization of Ben Roethlisberger, or whatever a given person finds odious.
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