By Esti DeAngelis, Managing Editor
Twenty-one years on earth and I have never been a sports person. Gun to my head, I could not explain how football works, and my 11-year-old sister would easily beat me in a race. Still, I was irrationally invested in the Winter Olympics this month. I’m talking figure skating, curling, bobsled, speed skating…I may have only heard of some of these sports last week (who even comes up with a sport like curling anyway?), but if it was on, I was locked in.
Now that the Games have ended, I’ve been thinking a lot about why I care so much. That is, why so many of us care so much. It’s not about the sports themselves. In fact, there are few things I find more anxiety-inducing than the thought of hurling myself off the side of a mountain at 60 miles per hour, or rotating 1,080 degrees in the air on a wooden board under heavy snowfall.
The Olympics are about something more, and I found myself considering what that thing is while reading an article recently about something entirely unrelated. Harvard University, as it turns out, has a grade inflation problem. In other words, at one of the most elite universities in the world, “it is far too easy to get perfect grades,” writes Isaac Mansell, a senior at Harvard. About 60% of awarded grades are As, according to a report released by Harvard’s Office of Undergraduate Education. “The majority of grades now occupy the same narrow band at the ‘extraordinary’ end of the scale,” writes Mansell. “If two-thirds of students are extraordinarily distinguished, from whom exactly are they distinct?”
The problem at Harvard is part of a larger issue at hand. Excellence simply isn’t celebrated anymore. People think they deserve to succeed, and that entitlement has slowly transformed institutions. The participation trophy has become the participation A+. Failure is blamed on larger (albeit imperfect) systems, not personal shortcomings.
Few areas of public life, it seems, still celebrate authentic excellence. The Olympics are one of these areas. Not everyone has the desire to hurl themselves headfirst on a sled down an icy tube at 80 miles per hour. But if you find out that you’re really, really good at doing just that and you compete to prove it, well, there’s something kind of moving about that. The Olympics compels talented people to work hard and to push themselves, and then it rewards those who, by its standards, are the most excellent.
Society may try to fight the impulse to reward greatness, but deep down, we recognize and connect to true excellence. That’s the reason we’re all hooked on the Olympics. The athletes deserve to be there, and they earn the medals they win.
But there’s another element to the Olympics obsession too. After all, don’t all professional sports still recognize greatness? And yet, at least for me, watching American sports leagues just isn’t as moving. Sure, it’s nice seeing my home city of Chicago come out on top, but I rarely get emotional about something like that. I think the reason why is that at the end of the day, the values of one American team aren’t any different from those of another. The “Chicago story” doesn’t mean something the way the “American story” does, so one American team succeeding over another isn’t significant the way an American athlete or team succeeding at the Olympics is.
In recent years, we haven’t only lost the guts to reward excellence, we’ve also lost the guts to say that America is excellent. We cringe at the notion that some countries and some cultures are better than others, replacing American exceptionalism with an unattainable kumbaya ideal. We’ve lost the courage to celebrate the American story. The Olympics not only lets us do that, but it actively builds American notions. The stories of American athletes are uniquely American stories, and the success of American athletes is the success of America itself. That’s the power of representing your country.
There’s Elana Meyers Taylor, the 41-year-old mother of two deaf children, one of whom also has Down syndrome, who won her sixth overall and first gold medal in bobsled this Olympics. She has medaled at five consecutive Games, and with this gold she became the oldest woman to ever win an individual gold medal at the Winter Olympics.
Then there’s Alysa Liu, the 20-year-old who won the U.S. their first individual women’s figure skating gold medal in 24 years. Her father was forced to flee China for the U.S. following his involvement in the pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989. Liu became the youngest-ever U.S. women’s national figure skating champion at only 13 years old, then came in 6th place at the 2022 Beijing Olympics at 16, where she and her father were targeted by Chinese spies because of his pro-democracy advocacy. Liu retired from figure skating later that year before un-retiring in 2024 and winning two gold medals in 2026 in what has become one of the greatest comeback stories in the history of the sport.
Finally, on the last day of the Games, the U.S. men’s hockey team defeated their arch-rival Canada to win their first gold medal since 1980. To celebrate, they brought onto the ice the young children of Johnny Gaudreau, a hockey player who was killed alongside his brother by a drunk driver in August 2024 and who likely would have made the 2026 Olympic team. His jersey hung in the team’s locker room the whole Games.
All of these moments have something in common, something more than the fact that they all made me cry. They are all American moments. What makes them American moments is the people behind them. When Americans are excellent, America becomes more excellent. And when America is excellent, it feels really good. We, like Harvard, can try all we want to pretend that everyone can be extraordinary at everything, or we can pretend that there’s something wrong with saying America is extraordinary. But when we watch Americans at the Olympics, we feel these things in our bones.
The official slogan of Team USA’s Olympics advertising campaign is “One For All.” Sitting through countless commercials, the line got stuck in my head eventually: “Just one of us can do it for all of us.” It made me feel something, a kind of vicarious pride and sense of accomplishment. I may not have heard of half of these sports before, but there was nothing like watching that American flag fly just a bit higher than everyone else’s and hearing our anthem play knowing that I may not have heard of this sport, but some American somewhere in the country worked hard, trained hard and became the best at it in the world.
I’m genuinely sad that the Olympics are over because nothing else in public life feels quite like it. But in two years, Los Angeles will host the first American Olympics of my lifetime. I may not be a “sports person,” but this time, I’m thinking of following the competitions that lead up to the Games, just to kick that patriotism into overdrive. 2028 can’t come soon enough.
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