These Olympics Are Not a Shelter

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.