THE GAMES TRIUMPHANT
By PICO IYER/ATLANTA
Our life, said Pythagoras, "is like the great and crowded assembly at the Olympic Games," which is a roundabout, Olympian way of saying the Games are as full of terror and chaos as the lives they temporarily eclipse. On a less exalted level, in Atlanta's official fairy tale of the Games, the first of the five Olympian qualities that a hero must master (in the realm where the Olympian flame always burns bright) is perseverance.
The Olympics this year were a study in perseverance, from the thousands who breathed new life into a haunted party to the athletes who stayed focused amid bomb threats in a city that had waited forever to show off the New South (a phrase coined in 1886). As the Centennial Games came to an end, it seemed as if a slim hope had gone 15 rounds with hard reality and emerged bloodied but just ahead on points. Atlanta had faced its share of biblical afflictions--rain and thunder, explosions far and near, a plague of journalists and the smell of lucre. Yet the stars raved about the crowds as much as the crowds raved about the stars, the venues shone, the volunteers (mostly) smiled and the athletes never failed us. Simply put, the sports were thrilling.
Every time one looked up at the bank of 20 TV screens in the Olympic Stadium media subcenter, one could see arms being raised, in victory or despair. A man called Talant scored with two minutes left to lift Spain to the medal round, above Egypt, in team handball, 20-19. The perennial Olympian, basketball hero Oscar Schmidt, in his fifth and last Games, put up an absurd shot for Brazil with 17 seconds left, and it fell in, and Puerto Rico was defeated. In the new sport of women's softball, an American pitcher was one strike away from a perfect game when reality fell asleep--she gave up a home run and lost.
In the age of "plausibly live" broadcasts and virtual-reality competitions and an Olympic Experience store, the highlights of the first interactive Games were plain, old-fashioned human interactions. Bagpipes played on Peachtree Street, and fans learned a new lexicon in which misters are not just gentlemen in Georgia and ticket-holders are made of plastic. The effortlessly graceful Marie-Jose Perec showed that she was a true champion when her bronzed rival in the 400 m, Falilat Ogunkoya, teared up as she thought of the mother she had just lost and Perec warmly hugged her (while a volunteer fetched a Kleenex). Japanese said "Muchas gracias" to Cuban baseball players, and the Cubans responded, with typical charm, "Domo arigato." Charles Barkley gave his practice jersey to the 14-year-old daughter of Alice Hawthorne, the woman killed in Atlanta's bombing.
Nearly all the memorable moments, in fact, were of a kind too big for the small screen and less concerned with headlines than, say, heartlines. A Kiss beat a Deal in the hammer throw, and tiny Morris Brown College saw its largest crowd ever, waving rubber swords, when India and Pakistan eliminated each other in field hockey by playing to a 0-0 tie. When an Indonesian pair beat a Malaysian duo in a stirring, come-from-behind victory in men's badminton, scores of Indonesians lent their voices to a rendition of their jaunty national anthem, while Malaysians joined in the cheers, and good ole boys marveled at the speed and excitement of the game. "That was awesome," said an Atlantan. "There must be a billion people watching this around the world. It's bigger than the Super Bowl."
Those who carped, indeed, about the $130 limited-edition mini-Coke bottles and the Elvis-imitator congestion of Atlanta's streets could have found the Games in lowercase by wandering farther afield to the outlying venues. All around the lesser sports, the air was thick with suntan oil as children played in wading pools and teams of volunteers cleared courts to the demonic sounds of Jerry Lee Lewis singing Great Balls of Fire. In Savannah, Georgia, where yachting was staged, a media-transport coordinator consisted of a man in a deck chair on an empty sidewalk. In Atlanta Beach, only 230 miles from the nearest real sand, beach-volleyball fans sipped daiquiris in their bathing trunks while strangers sprayed them down with high-tech, fluorescent-green water pistols. And when one entered a media center in the Georgian Athens, behind a sign that said WEIGHT AREA, a floor below the animal-sciences department, one found 16 volunteers dancing attention on two members of the international press corps while others poked around in a copy machine with a pencil flashlight.
At such moments, one could recall that the Olympics at heart are just a festival of youth, in which college-age dreamers come to live in dorms, meet new friends and learn about the world. And, in doing so, they teach us about the four other Olympic qualities that the fairy-tale Olympian mythically has to conquer: excellence (in the heroic third-straight gold of 4-ft. 11-in. Turkish weight lifter Naim Suleymanoglu); integrity (in the radiant face of Jonathan Edwards, the British triple jumper who said he was thrilled to get silver and made you believe it); sportsmanship (in the tears of American Lindsay Davenport after she beat her "very best friend," Mary Joe Fernandez, in the women's tennis semifinals); and brotherhood (in the 82-kg wrestling bout in which Elmadi Jabrailov of Kazakhstan beat Lucman Jabrailov of Moldovia--his elder brother and coach--before the two went off to relax together).
On the very first day of the Games, David Robinson, the dignified Dream Teamer, was asked if the rest of the world was growing less awestruck of the American professionals. Yes, he said, "and our job is to re-create that awe." Carl Lewis did that in Atlanta, and Michael Johnson, and Alexei Nemov, and Deng Yeping. All Atlanta, no stranger to reconstruction, set about making the wonder feel young again.