The Olympic Games, testing the world's best athletes in a crucible of fierce competition, can whip feelings into a fine froth.
A pattern of immense buildup followed by crushing defeat is the lot of many Olympic contenders.The ups and downs are at the heart of the Olympic experience. The athletes themselves know how stiff their competition is. They know, too, that at the rarified Olympic standard, differences are measured in hundredths of a second and the smallest mistake can do them in. In view of this intense competition, the surprising thing is not the disappointment of the losers but the fact so many thousands commit themselves to the routine needed to get anywhere near an Olympic arena.
They are willing - the best of them - to commit years of unstinting effort and arduous training for one small chance for a medal. They are willing, in short, to take risks, and this is what distinguishes them from the less-committed.
This same kind of readiness to lay everything on a long shot is what often makes the difference between winning and losing in other endeavors. Bill Clinton, when he first started out in search of the 1992 presidential nomination, had few illusions that he could actually win. Richard Nixon fought his way back from two crushing defeats to win two terms in the White House. Florence Nightingale defied Victorian convention, which held that nurses were camp followers or prostitutes, to nurse British soldiers in the slaughter of the Crimean War. Her action raised nursing to the level of a respected profession.
Thomas Edison spent years and tried several thousand different fibers for filaments in his new electric light bulb before finding one that would work. Pablo Picasso defied convention and broke new ground with his own version of expressionism. Gandhi stood up to the might of the British Empire in leading India to independence. Rosa Parks refused to ride in the back of the bus in Alabama and by her courage helped to ignite the civil rights movement.
Such a list could go on and on. History, in fact, is defined by those who have taken great risks in pursuit of extraordinary goals. What matters to such people, I suspect, is not the level of risk (which goes with the territory) but the possibility of stunning achievement.
Part of the Olympic drama is that individual failures are seen publicly as clearly as the victories. In most fields, one who stumbles does so in silence. When top athletes falter, everyone knows it; this compounds their disappointment.
The pain is the greater, of course, because so many of these Olympic stars are quite young and have invested so much of themselves in this fierce competition. Some will win the gold; some lose and fret about it for years; some will lose and go on to other things. But the intensity of the chase is such that, win or lose, none will remain unchanged by the experience.
As a metaphor, I suppose one could say the slippery slope gets steeper as you near the top. This accentuates the risk and ensures that more strivers will fall. But it also ensures that the few who make it will have a moment in the sun that few have shared.
Any extraordinary achievement demands a rare single-mindedness of purpose; that alone is sufficient to separate most people from superstars.