“That is the kind of joy that, at one point in your life, I hope everybody in the world gets to experience something like that.”
The words of Tim Daggett, the NBC gymnastics analyst at the Paris Olympics, as Stephen Nedoroscik was mobbed by his whooping and hollering teammates after coming through with a clutch pommel horse routine to seal a team bronze and break the men’s 16-year medal drought.
Nice sentiment, Tim, but most of us Walter Mittys out here slogging through the day-to-day will experience no such thing. The birth of a child, you say? Joyful, yes, but more of a slow-rolling epiphany than an explosion of instantaneous triumph after years of preparation in obscurity.
The “pommel horse guy” became a star, of course, so much the better for his nerdiness, his solemn removal of his Clark Kent glasses correcting seriously impaired vision (“I don’t need to see . . . I’m just doing it by how it feels”), and his sincerity (his reaction to his sudden fame was an appreciation for the attention it would bring his sport).
All of which is a preamble to the admission that I’m still on a comedown after the best Olympics ever. Come on, horses and riders tearing through the grounds of Versailles and along the Grand Canal for the cross-country “team eventing” competition? Beach volleyball in the evenings beneath a glowing Eiffel Tower? A hair-raising “La Marseillaise” ringing out arena-wide in salute of a fourth swimming gold medal for Leon Marchand? All only a few weeks after the nation narrowly avoided being torn asunder in snap elections.
Speaking of a nation’s civic life in shambles and in need of rejuvenation, I see that the 2028 Olympics will be heading to Los Angeles. Now, the L.A. River is no Seine, but a concrete channel carrying a weak stream of agriculturally polluted runoff. And the perpetually rushing I-5, which out-expressways even our miserable Long Island Expressway, is no Rue de Rivoli. But here’s hoping.