You Had to Be There

Now it can be told: there is a lot of Wikipedia in the press section at the Olympics. For every reporter who can tell you that a waza-ari was clearly just a glorified yuko or that the Hungarian is the one to watch, there are quite a few more — the feature writers, the curious onlookers who normally cover track and field, the poor souls who were assigned a dozen different sports, me — typing “judo + rules” into Google.

An argument can be made that this is excusable. There is just so much going on, so many different events in so many different places, all at the same time. Victory ceremonies are squeezed in between long jumps; a fencer’s dream is dashed while three other bouts are going on around her; the javelins sail toward the high jumpers.

The Olympics seem like a giant, ultraefficient sports factory, churning out triumph and disappointment on a stunning scale. Considered this way, they are still routinely electrifying. It is hard to beat the thrill of being in a crowd of spectators, many of whom are there because it was the only ticket they could get, roaring for a weight lifter from Guatemala as if the fate of humanity hinged on Christian Alberto Lopez Bobadilla’s battle against the law of gravity.

But the one-big-human-family element of the Olympics is only a part of the event, as is the one big American (or Chinese or British or Kenyan) family or even all the examples of individuals overcoming adversity (because, let’s be honest, there is so much overcoming that it becomes difficult to recall which adversity was overcome, and by whom).

You really can get a lot of that from television, tape-delayed or not.

What you can’t get from TV, and what I came to really love about the Olympics, were the little shavings on the factory floor, the curious byproducts of an event that brings together so many people from so many places in such narrow quarters