Joe Biden held a Zoom call with Team USA Olympians on Saturday as the Tokyo Games drew to a close.
“You handle yourself with such grace, and such decency,” Biden said. “You made me so damn proud.”
Fairly standard stuff. After all, what else could an American president say about an Olympic team? Wait. Don’t answer that.
In a nation where everyone seems to take sides on everything, athletes are still being told to stick to sports by politicians who don’t stick to politics. But Biden’s praise was non-partisan, heartfelt and apt. There was no attempt to deploy sports as ammunition in a cynical culture war, stoke hostility or equate political leanings with athletic performance.
The men’s track athletes were mostly outrun, a resurgent Australia and Britain gobbled golds in the pool, the usually dominant women’s soccer team were flawed and the US won fewer medals than in 2016, only topping the table by one gold ahead of China. But these were a triumphant Olympics for the US. Better than Rio, because class and empathy shone through as surely as the glinting medals around Team USA’s necks.
“These are the things that people look at around the world – more than anything that I do as your president, or other people do in public life, they get the impression of who we are as Americans,” Biden said.
That image was blurry in 2016. Sure, Simone Biles, Katie Ledecky and Michael Phelps were paradigms of excellence. But headlines damned the swimmer Ryan Lochte as an emblem of the “ugly American” abroad after his commotion in a gas station. The goalkeeper Hope Solo upset Brazilians with social media posts that seemed to make light of the Zika virus outbreak.
In a manufactured controversy that seemed to be an echo of the aggressive demands for ostentatious displays of patriotism that swept the country after 9/11, the gymnast Gabby Douglas was excoriated for not placing her hand over her heart as the gold medal-winning gymnast and her four teammates stood for the national anthem.
In a nation that constantly brags about its free speech credentials, her critics conflated patriotism with conformism, an attitude as wrongheaded as it is persistent.
As the Rio Games ended the world was about to notice a quarterback named Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem and athlete activism would soon divide fans along political lines. Looking back, it is plain to see that a few months before the presidential election, America was under the dark clouds of a gathering storm that is yet to abate. Tokyo was the social-distancing, facial-covering Games, but Rio was when the mask slipped.
Better memories will endure from Tokyo, and not only the visceral images of sporting triumph and disaster that cascade into our vision, race after race, game after game, day after day, with the relentless energy of a waterfall.
Biles cheering on her teammates. Ledecky warmly congratulating Ariarne Titmus after the Australian passed at the last to take the 400m freestyle. The openly gay basketball star Sue Bird and the Cuban-American speed skating and now baseball silver medallist, Eddy Alvarez, voted by their peers as opening ceremony flag-bearers, representatives of a proudly and passionately multicultural, diverse, nation.
Karate bronze medal winner Ariel Torres, born in Cuba, retelling his immigrant story. The shot-putter Raven Saunders’ “X” protest in support of people enduring oppression. Tamyra Mensah-Stock becoming the first Black woman to win Olympic wrestling gold. Caeleb Dressel, the fastest swimmer on the planet, a five-time gold medallist in Tokyo, striding into interview rooms and talking about feeling the pressure, about being vulnerable. If it was tempting to call his feats superhuman – well, he was here to tell us he isn’t, and and we wrote it and believed it.
When you’re watching a festival of the best athletes in the world, many of them more brilliant at doing what they do than any competitor who has ever lived, abnormality is baked into the whole arrangement by definition.
But in Japan, amid the bromides of IOC president Thomas Bach and in a subdued general atmosphere and rigid protocols – a cursed context of inflexibility and anxiety that sucked some of the joy out of the whole overwrought party – US athletes made valuable contributions to add nuance and bring attention to discussions of mental health, civil rights, tolerance and diversity.
American Olympians, traditionally honoured on cereal boxes, are no longer content to be perceived as cardboard cut-outs. Biden is right: they were decent. And they also won a ton of medals.