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The alarm came pretty quickly, but I was psyched to see my first Olympic wrestling tournament because several of my students at Morningside are wrestlers, plus my favorite philosopher, Plato, was a wrestler in his youth. We arrived at the venue to find a big crowd of Iranians gathered out front with flags and hats. Wrestling is a big sport in Iran and the Middle East generally. There were even women with Muslim headscarves and “Go Iran” baseball caps. In addition, there were groups of Swedes, Turks, Lithuanians, Greeks, and Americans.
Inside, the venue was like a circus with three separate competitions going on simultaneously. It wasn’t always easy keeping track of each match, especially when I was trying to follow two matches at once. The various rooting sections made lots of noise for their compatriots, but nothing compared to the cheers for the Chinese athletes, one of whom wrestled an American named Adam Wheeler in the 1/8th finals. During that match, there was a kind of cheering war: shouts of “CHI-NA” alternating with “USA.” The American won the match, but we lost the cheering contest. The circus kept going until one, then two of the mats were empty. The final match was between an Italian and a Swede and it was called in favor of the Italian while the Swede was ahead on points—for reasons that were unclear to me. Some Swedes next to us started yelling insults to the judge in (colorful) English—not a nice way to end the session, but not ugly enough to spoil the spirit.
More than any other Games, I have noticed an obsession here with the medal count. It seems as though many Chinese aren’t into the sports so much as they are into the idea of winning more medals than the USA. This isn’t so different from the attitude among many Americans. I have some philosophical objections to the medal count, or more generally to the view that the Olympic Games is a contest among nations. By any standards of sport logic, this would be an unfair contest since teams have different numbers of competitors and enter different numbers of events. But even if those things were equal, as in world cup soccer, it would still hold that larger and wealthier countries have a huge advantage. In fact, GDP and population are the two biggest predictors of a country’s placing on the medal count. The medal table was an invention of journalists and for a long time the IOC resisted it. Now they post it on their website. I do think it’s meaningful to have athletes represent their countries and compete against each other as equal individuals, but the Games should not just be about winning the most medals. It is a celebration of humanity:
our excellences, our shortcomings, our commonalities.
In the evening I met sophomore Zhang Lu Yao for dinner at a local restaurant. She came to the lectures I gave here in March and became interested in philosophy. We talked about her family back in Xian and her future plans. Just like an American student, she told her family that she wanted to study philosophy and they protested that it was not practical enough. It was not unlike chatting with one of my Morningside students, except that she has somewhat more limited opportunities. She told me that she was planning to work for a month at KFC (yes, they have many outlets here) to get enough money to study French at the embassy. The amount less than 20 US dollars; wages here must be very low. Lu Yao is a little bit pessimistic about her future, but her English is already excellent at 17 years old and she has an insatiable desire to learn—I think her future must be bright.
My enduring memory of the day is the incongruous image of several muscular, macho, chest-thumping wrestlers moved to tears—even sobbing—after they won their semi-final matches. Why, at the Olympics, is it the winners and not the losers who cry? I think I know the reason. An Olympic medal is something an athlete starts dreaming of at a very young age, they you work so hard and overcome such hardship over so many years to have it all come down a single match, or even a single point at the end of a match. The emotional load is huge, and while the losers keep bearing the load to fight another day, for the winners it finally starts flowing out. The tears are just drops in the river of emotion. It’s hard for the spectators not to be moved to tears themselves.
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