The Greatest Games
So it has begun! Ah sorry, no I didn’t mean Pokémon Go. Although I will admit that, this too, has its positive sides, but let’s leave this topic for another day.
I mean the other greatest game – the 2016 Summer Olympics, or Jogos Olímpicos de Verão de 2016, as they are known in their host country’s native Portuguese.
Each city hosting the games, Athens, Beijing, London and now Rio to cover just the last decade, have aimed at organizing the bigger, better, and certainly more memorable games than their predecessors.
At the Athens Games in 2004, the organizers had found a unique way of making their games the biggest in Olympic history. The Hellenic Games were definitely inimitable as no other nation could start the marathon races in the city of Marathon.
In 2008, Beijing hosted the games of records and superlatives. In true Chinese tradition, the opening ceremony was unforgettably artistic, acrobatic and beautiful and the venues such as the “Birds Nest” and the “Water Cube” architectural masterpieces.
London 2012 introduced a new kind of superlative. 10,500 athletes from 204 countries competed for 302 gold medals. Events that were made possible thanks to the support of a 200,000 strong workforce. 600 basketballs, 2,700 footballs and 356 pairs of boxing gloves were sourced for the London Games.
True to the Olympic motto “Citius, Altius, Fortius” meaning Faster, Higher, Stronger, each host city has duly outdone the previous one. Unfortunately, not only the celebrated achievements of organizers and participants were memorable. Doping scandals and political statements have always overshadowed the Games, like China’s appalling human rights records before Beijing 2008 and this year’s protests in the streets of Rio.
Rio 2016 had not even started and issues like the Zika virus, the death of a wild jaguar during a torch ceremony and the country’s economical collapse had already made huge headlines worldwide. So what are we going to remember from the Rio Games? Scandals, doping charges, corruption cases? Let’s not.
photo by businessnews.blogs.latrobe.edu.au Emma Sherry.
Besides some phenomenal world and Olympic records and truly memorable victories, I will choose to remember this years Olympic Games for the fact that there is a Refugee Olympic Team, and for the Games manifesto of “unity, respect for diversity and the will for change”. I want to remember Rio 2016 for the North Korean athlete who asked her South Korean competitor for a selfie, and for Joseph Schooling, who met Michael Phelps in 2008 in a Singapore swimming pool and now beat his idol to a gold medal. But maybe most of all, I will remember Rafael Nadal’s radiating smile as he walked into Stadium Maracanã with the Spanish team. That smile of anticipation, pride, generosity, these intense emotions are what Olympic Games should be all about.
Let the Games begin!