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Ok so I know I’m not breaking any new ground by declaring
that no one likes losing. But the thing is that how much losing sucks relates
to the context of the loss itself. One example of this is Bill Simmons’ Levels of Losing, but that’s not specifically what I’m talking about here.
What I’m talking about is differences between losing at an
event like the Olympics and losing, for example, a footy game.
When your team loses a footy game or whatever sport you hold
dear, of course it sucks and you’d much prefer to win, but in context it’s
usually not that hard to swallow. If you follow a team doing well and they drop
a game or too, well it’s a long season and no one goes undefeated (usually). If
you follow a team that sucks, well at least they are developing young players,
implementing a new culture, whatever the guys running the club are telling you
they are doing to keep you going while they suck. Plus if you don’t win the
championship, there is always next year and the year after that and the year
after that.
The Olympics is very different. First and foremost, it’s
every four years. Yes there is the Winter Olympics too, but most countries seem
to be more into one than the other. So it’s easy to explain why there is so
much interest and excitement and pressure on each event when there isn’t a next
year. It’s not just the athletes who have to wait that long for their next opportunity;
it’s all the fans watching too.
See the thing with the Olympics is that for fans, unless you
are Chinese, it’s 99.9% losing. In most events, even if your country has
someone who qualified, they are just making up the numbers or maybe making the
final and having a very respectable finish, but not really contending for gold.
Sometimes I find it easiest and more fun to watch events Australia didn’t even
qualify for, like most weightlifting weight divisions, so I can simply enjoy
watching the competition and not really feel any tension or pressure about the
result.
Now that 99.9% losing is expected due to the amount of
events in the Olympics and for a country like Australia we don’t mind it as
long as every once in a while we do get that sweet taste of victory. Eventually
you become accustomed to a certain level of success, so no one expects
Australia to compete with the Chinese or Americans on the medal tally, but
certainly to finish top 10 and push for top 5. So when the Olympics turns out the
way it has so far, things go ugly very quickly.
Without those semi-regular victories to enjoy between
watching the guys and girls in green and gold come last or simply out of the
running, it becomes difficult to continue to cheer on the entire Olympic team.
See the dirty secret about sport, even individual sports, is
that fans don’t really care about the athlete themselves for the most part.
Especially in sports you aren’t living and dying with each week like you would
for your football team. What fans are supporting is what the athlete
represents, be it the local team or the entire country. James Magnussen isn’t
being supported by the nation because he is James Magnussen, he is being
supported because he is the Australian representative in the 100m freestyle
(and maybe in his case because he is good looking). When he showed over the
past couple of years that he was the best in the World at that event, it built
up the hopes of a nation that he would be one of those few and far between
tastes of victory. That’s why some of the comments I have seen about James and
other Aussie athletes who didn’t win don’t surprise me.
On the scoreboard there is no difference between Magnussen
winning silver and someone like young Jessica Fox winning silver in the
canoeing, but it’s all about the expectation built up over months or years
prior. Fans don’t really have a right to expect anything, but it is human
nature that they will. So we celebrate an unexpected silver medal in one sense
and get disappointed by “winning” an unexpected silver in another.
For me personally, I would celebrate if the Australian
Boomers won a bronze medal more than I would celebrate any gold medal we could
win in everything else.
Is it fair on the athletes who prove they should be
considered the favourite to win gold that we malign them if they don’t, whilst
we celebrate others overachieving to the same result? Of course it isn’t. So I
really hope James Magnussen and others don’t feel betrayed by their own
country, but fans are selfish and it’s not something I see changing any time
soon.
Now if only we could actually win something sometime soon,
we’d all feel a little bit better.
Go Australia.
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