Olympic athleticism: how can anyone possibly do that? (part 1)

Did you watch the Paris Summer Olympics? There’s no question the athletes inspire awe and wonder — especially in those of us who are not particularly coordinated! In this Part 1 of 2, I talk about the Olympics in general and a couple sports I find particularly amazing, plus share a story or two of my own athletic mishaps.

 

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Meet the nations that have never won an Olympic medal (and two that just did) (New York Times)

What makes an elite badminton player?

Music: Jens East — Daybreak (ft. Henk) www.soundcloud.com/jenseast
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution V4.0

Transcription (remember, this is a direct transcription of what I said and is not actually how I write!):

Welcome to 9 Minutes of Wonder. I’m Betsy Hedberg. I hope this podcast will help you rekindle your sense of wonder for this awe-inspiring world. If you like what you hear in the next few minutes, please subscribe and share.

Well, I’ve been spending a lot of time watching the Olympics in Paris. Have you? I didn’t know I was going to spend this much time with it, but I kind of can’t take my eyes off it.

And you know, I love the Olympics. It’s very distracting from other things going on in the world. And there are other reasons too.

When I was a kid, I was fascinated with the Olympics also. And I was like, how do they do that? And I think that even if we don’t watch the Olympics, even if we don’t really care about sports, we can all agree that these athletes are amazing and marvel at how they even can possibly do any of the things that they do. I look at every single sport and I think I could never do that. And I have no idea how they can.

So I think the Olympic athleticism is pretty awe-inspiring. And I’m going to talk about that a little bit today.

I’ll also say that, of course, I love the fact that the Olympics brings together people from all over the world. And the Summer Olympics in particular has people from many countries that don’t get a lot of attention. In fact, countries maybe that you’ve never heard of or that you barely ever hear about. I love that. It’s a, you know, it’s a kind of global feel-good-let’s-put-aside-our-differences thing. I know that’s idealistic and that there is politics involved, but I do love that international, global, coming-together kind of spirit.

That makes me feel good. And I’m always happy when someone from a smaller or a poorer country wins, because of course, the larger and wealthier countries are the ones that tend to dominate, like the United States, of course.

I’ll share an article in the program notes from the New York Times about how around 70 countries have been going to the Olympics, some of them for a long time, some of them just recently or just starting recently, but they’ve never won a medal. So a lot of countries go and they compete and they have incredible athletes, but they still aren’t at the level to win a medal. And the article talks about how it’s not enough to be determined and to be a great athlete. You also need the right kind of training and equipment and facilities, and a lot of countries don’t have that.

But when countries do have success, it can help the people of their country. For example, this article that I just mentioned quotes Costa Rican swimmer, Sylvia Poll, who won a silver medal — and that was Costa Rica’s first Olympic medal — in 1988. She said “Once you get a triumph of that level, it has that collective pride that motivates people but it also pushes them to practice sports and, in my case, there are now more pools and more people swimming.” So her silver medal in 1988 inspired Costa Ricans and people in other parts of Central America to do more swimming, and the countries funded more pools. So that’s cool.

But for the rest of today, I’m going to focus on the athleticism itself. When I was a kid, I bought into this American ideal, this kind of American narrative that I could be anybody I wanted to be. I could do anything I wanted to do.

And when I was about nine years old, we moved from the city of Chicago to a suburb that was full of really athletic kids, and they played sports outdoors all the time. And I didn’t know how to play any of these sports, indoor sports too.

I had never heard of volleyball. And the first day of school, we had to go down to the gym and play volleyball. It was terrifying, this ball coming at me. And of course I was mocked and teased because I didn’t know how to play.

So I developed this idea that if I just worked hard enough and tried hard enough, I could be in the Olympics too. And I could do anything. And I could prove to all those kids that I was a really great athlete.

And my sport was going to be four-square. Do you still remember how to play four-square? If you don’t know what that is, you can look it up, but there’s a square and it’s divided into four smaller squares and each kid stands in one of the squares and you have to bounce this rubber ball across. I hardly even remember how to play now.

And I sucked at it, but I just thought, well, maybe if I bounce the ball enough and if I practice and play enough, I can be a four-square Olympic champion, or at least get into the Olympics. And I really worked at bouncing that ball and getting better at it. And then I remembered or realized that four-square is not an Olympic sport at all. It’s not even a sport really. I don’t know. It’s a playground game, right? So I think maybe I just gave up my Olympic dreams at that time, but let’s talk about the real Olympics.

Because again, I have a sense of complete wonder at the people who can do these impressive athletic things. And I’ve been watching some incredible sports, even sports that every four years you can see, but then I completely forget that they exist.

Like the trampoline. I watched that last night. That looks like fun, right? Except I don’t know how they get so high. And of course I would be probably scared to even do one single flip, let alone like three or four before I went back down.

And a couple of nights ago, I watched the trap shooting, the women’s trap shooting. I’ve never seen anything like that, where they have to shoot this clay pigeon thing that comes out of the machine and it’s really far away. I mean, yeah, they’re very good at it. And the woman from Guatemala won, and it was so happy and she was so happy

But I want to talk about just a few sports in particular and go a little deeper into them. The first one is weightlifting. And I find this sport hard to watch because it looks painful. And I’m also always worried they’re going to drop it and hurt themselves.

So how much can people lift? The current record for the man in the heaviest weight category, like he’s the heaviest, was 267 kilograms. And for the woman, it was 187 kilograms. So yikes, that’s heavy. If you think more in pounds, you can double the number of kilograms and then add a little bit more. So it’s impressive.

And the other thing I learned about weightlifting that I didn’t know, you might know this, I didn’t, is that they have special shoes. You can buy shoes for anything, right? So they have to have special weightlifting shoes that are a little bit raised in the back, and it helps the angle of their body so that when they lift the weight, it’s distributed in the right way and it helps them lift more and do it safely.  So I actually went online and looked up weightlifting shoes for like 300 euros. I could buy my own pair, but I don’t need them.

And then there are these two Olympic sports that I and most of my friends used to play at parties. And I don’t mean this in any sort of condescending way to the people who do it professionally or in the Olympics, but badminton and table tennis are well-known party sports, at least where I come from.

So badminton really impresses me because we used to play it at backyard barbecues and picnics or around the pool, or I think maybe even in the pool, but it was just for fun. And of course I was really bad at it. And then badminton became a serious sport when I was in high school, serious at my high school.

Anyway, I don’t even think we had a badminton team, but it was serious in my PE, my physical education classes. And where I grew up, where I went to high school, we had to pass four years of PE classes in order to graduate. And one of the last days of school in my last year of high school, I had to take a badminton test in my PE class.

So I put on my shorts and went into the gym and the teacher was there with his little clipboard. And I had to, I think I had to serve three badminton, we called them birdies, but I think officially they’re called the shuttle or the shuttlecock, but I had to serve them over the net. That’s all I had to do. I didn’t have to try out for the Olympics. And I couldn’t do it. I could not get even one of them over the net. It’s probably not that hard, but I just couldn’t do it that day.

And I almost flunked PE and he was going to give me an F, a non-passing grade. And that would have meant I had to go to summer school and I couldn’t graduate high school, even though I had top grades in most of the more academic classes. So I hate badminton.

But when I see badminton in the Olympics, of course, it’s like completely impressive.

It debuted as a sport in 1992 and the most successful team is China. They already have a gold medal this year in badminton. Sorry if that’s a spoiler and you haven’t watched yet.

The shuttle, the thing that is hit over the net, is incredibly fast. It’s been recorded moving at 400 kilometers per hour, which is about 254 miles per hour. And that’s just incredible when you think about how the record for a tennis ball in a tennis game or a tennis match is 263.4 kilometers per hour or 164 miles per hour.

So badminton is way faster. The fastest baseball pitch, fastball was by Aroldis Chapman at 105.8 miles per hour. So badminton again is impressively fast.

And I was thinking, you know, what is it, what would it take to be at that level? And apparently they have done some research on the elite badminton players and found out that they have a shorter reaction time to visual stimuli than most of us do. So they see something coming and they react more readily and that makes sense. And they also have more precise reactions and better hand-eye coordination.

None of this is surprising, right? But they’ve actually studied these athletes. So they’re able to anticipate what’s coming at them. You can imagine that’s a really good skill in other parts of life, right? Like when you’re crossing the street. And they also have incredible focus and intense concentration, which is true for all of these sports. But this one is so quick that I wonder if the players need extra ability to focus and concentrate.

But that’s all I’m going to say about the Olympics today. But don’t worry, I will continue because this is part one of two.

So I’ll release part two within the next couple days. And I will also tell you whether I graduated from high school, if I passed the badminton test or what happened with that. So please stay tuned!

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