In Which I Examine My Reticence to Embrace the Olympics

Of all sporting events, it’s the Olympics that always disappoint me. The disappointment is always preceded by an earnest attempt at trying it “one more time:” you have to concede that the shortcoming was your own.

But the disappointment is the same. As it is with health-care debate, Chinese food, and the television show 24.

Perhaps, I’ve wondered, it’s the strange choices that broadcasters make. This year, NBC delayed airing events and then puzzled everyone by capping the event with none other than. . . the season premiere of The Marriage Ref. (Re: television show plugs. What is a product plug, if I actually bash the product? A blug?)

On the other hand, there was that 1,400-year dry spell of corporate endorsements and effusive celebratory speeches and ESPN highlights. Now, there’s an Olympics--winter, summer, gay, special, metaphorical--every six or seven weeks.

Maybe, it has to do with the athletes. Unlike basketball prodigies and other sports figures, Olympic athletes toil in seeming futility for a dozen years, until the breathing beast of 24-7 news coverage turns its attention to them. Lindsey Vonn, the chosen starlet of the 2010 Winter Games, is remarkable for how perfectly average she is. I felt the same way about Michael Phelps: could this incredible talent and enormous stage have happened to someone else?

The way Olympic athletes take the biggest stage of their lives just doesn’t fit our moment any more. For a while, Vonn, Phelps, and, in another sport, Kobe Bryant have tried to milk the international sports star image / multimillion-dollar product spokesman mold that Michael Jordan established two decades ago. Restrained, ordinary, bland.

It could be said that Vonn and Phelps have a different set of pressures in individual sports (and under-appreciated sports, at that). Neither of them has to inspire trust in teammates or incorporate themselves in larger team dynamics. Charisma is not something that Vonn has to cultivate, or at least not in the same way that a Drew Brees or Brett Favre do.

Then you have LeBron James’s winking post-modernism. Here’s an athlete who will experiment with his image in Nike commercials and parody the media pose in his pre-game rituals. That’s an athlete that will connect to an audience that has tired of the rote habits of Jordan’s crass, measured image. That’s a 21st century athlete.