Not far from my house, a middle-aged man was collecting his empty trash cans from the side of the road, his most demanding exercise of the day, if anything. He called out to me as he passed by: “You’re brave! You have to be brave to run like that…”
Come on. There is this slight reluctance when, having reached the end of the warm-up walk, you have to get moving for real, this muted protest of the body at the moment of engaging second gear. But courage? The day before, comfortably seated in my office, I had seen Sifan Hassan overtake two Kenyans and two Ethiopians in the last meters of the Olympic marathon to escape with the gold medal on the esplanade of the Invalides. It had not even been forty-eight hours since she had run the 10,000 m, and barely more than a week since she had lined up at the start of the 5000 m, to win bronze in both distances.
Three podiums for nearly sixty kilometers of going all out against the world’s best long-distance runners, that’s courage. Hassan (quoted by AFP): “I don’t know if everyone who runs the marathon is afraid of it or if I’m the only one, but I was scared to death before this race.”
That she won, I remind you. In front of a lion or a mouse, conquering fear itself: that’s a reasonable goal. My Ti-Mé was perhaps right, after all: on the scale of a Sunday jogger, I have to be courageous. It could even be that, having arrived at the foot of the steep climb of the rue de Bretagne which will finish me off by closing the loop, I will be able to draw from the same source (if not the same reserves…) as a Marianne Hogan, who has just completed, in a little less than twenty-four hours, the 176 km and the 10,000 m of positive elevation gain of the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc. A whole day of climbing at a running pace in the face of a horse.
As a spectator, long-distance running is my favorite Olympic discipline. The tactical dimension humanizes these human speedsters. I love the moment when a favorite places himself in ambush a few meters from the gazelles who are galloping in front and seem to think they are capable of holding on until the finish line. Seeing Hassan breathing down the necks of this square of African women was a pure delight.
Yet it was the sprint final that brought me back to the Games, after a whole week of pretending to forget that a single computer click separated me from the Stade de France and an Eiffel Tower brightened by beach volleyball players offering a distracting view to the little uncles sipping their beers six time zones away — on the Canadian duo’s side that made it to the final, we really did see a lot of skin, to the point that the Brazilian rivals, their waists tucked into shorts, looked modest in comparison.
Other highlights: the men’s 200m final, where Noah Lyles’ sparing moves were completely overshadowed by the Olympian calm of the 21-year-old Botswanan who then set the American off, proving that Botswana (capital: Gaborone) can produce more than half-kilo diamonds; the basketball final where Stephen Curry was hitting three-pointers as if he were practicing his free throws in front of his garage door; and the men’s 4x100m final, of course.
After the Paris Games, the sports world continued to turn, the Alouettes to win, CF Montreal to lose, drunk drivers to take lives, and while the usual off-field echoes of the NFL preseason reached us (record $55 million per year contract, gunshot wounds, etc.) and Montreal sports scribes dissected endlessly, page after page after page, the strengths, weaknesses and future prospects of the smallest seed of hope picked up by the Canadiens — all that was missing was Demidov’s horoscope under the pen of these oracles —, meanwhile, other games, called Paralympics, began in Paris. As an anti-climax, two weeks after watching a stunt live by Tom Cruise at the Stade de France, it’s hard to do better.
There is a polite interest in the media coverage of these other games. I was talking about courage… What other word could one use to describe the performance of a swimmer who has no arms? And that of a soccer team (renamed blind football) that can’t see three steps ahead? If the Paralympics seem incapable of competing with the images of technical perfection that fuel the modern Games, it is perhaps because, more or less consciously, more or less secretly, we continue to adhere to an ideal of the aesthetic sports body inherited from ancient Greece.
By the way, why shouldn’t the Paralympic Games coincide, in time and space, with the other event? For the latter, the participants are already divided into two broad categories based on physical inequality: men, women. It would be enough to add that of para-athletes.
And if we absolutely want to organize parallel games, we will be spoiled for choice: trans-Olympic games for trans-identities of all stripes, zoolympic games whose main event will be the fetch of the ball and the frisbee by dog-olympians competing in as many categories as there are breeds of dogs.
Let’s imagine the terrible dilemma of this gentle madman that is the ordinary sports fan. It’s Thursday night, he’s sitting in front of the Chiefs-Ravens game that inaugurates another great American football season. Will he skip Mahomes and Lamar Jackson to watch, on Radio-Canada’s late-night sports block, the semi-final of boccia (a bowling game invented for the needs of victims of cerebral palsy) where Canada is playing in “mixed pairs” for the bronze medal?
Life is unfair.
Novelist, independent writer and atypical sports columnist, Louis Hamelin is the author of a dozen books.