My Love-Hate Relationship With The Olympics

By Victor Landa, NewsTaco Editor

I love to hate the Olympics. I consider the games a huge distraction – I can get little work done these weeks. My problem is that I have a TV monitor at about a 45 degree sight line, facing forward from my desk. I have the channel on the Olympic coverage, muted. But I glance at it too often to do my work any good. I watched the swimming and the gymnastics and the diving and the volleyball…all the while trying to get some work done.  Now we’re on to the track and field events.

The thing is that I’m a sucker for a good story, and the Olympics, any Olympics, is chock full of all kinds of personal narratives. Every athlete has a tale and it inevitably has to do with surmounting stacked odds and overcoming personal obstacles. I watched a young lady from Afghanistan run a preliminary heat of a track event this morning. She had no chance whatsoever of moving on to the next round, in fact she finished dead last, way behind her closest competitor. But she ran and in the end she smiled and congratulated every one of the other racers. I love that.

How can I get any work done. I hate that.

What’s amazing to me is that there are nit-pickers who will find something to criticize about the games themselves. They’ll dig and prod and figure a way to find something to complain about. But it seems to me that they’re missing the opportunity to rise above their petty selves. Because that’s what the games do, I think. Every four years, regardless of the  chaos and craziness going on across the world, we manage to come together to celebrate human achievement.

And yes, I get that the USA and China pretty much dominate everything, but the point is that they’re not the only competitors on the field, track, stage, or pool. Many times the story of the athlete who just made it to the games is much better than the story of the one that won the gold. And even then, in the US, the athletes are an amalgam of all kinds of nationalities and heritages. This is one of the Olympic narratives  that I like the most. The fact that there are 38 immigrants in the US Olympic team.

The Immigration Impact website recently did a cool story about them. Here’s part of that story:

These athletes remind us that Americans come from all over the world.

Here are some top New American athletes to watch as you tune in to this year’s Olympic Games:

Lopez Lomong (Men’s 5000M) was born in southern Sudan and kidnapped by rebels when he was six years old. He managed to escape and spent 10 years in a refugee camp in Kenya before moving to New York and realizing he was the fastest runner at his school.

Khatuna Lorig(Archery) competed in her first Olympics 20 years ago on the Unified Soviet Team, she went on to represent her native Georgia and will now represent the U.S. as the top-ranked American female archer. She hopes to popularize the sport, and was the archery trainer to The Hunger Games star, Jennifer Lawrence.

Meb Keflezighi(Marathon) fled his home country of Eritrea after a civil war broke out and was eventually granted refugee status in the U.S. He holds the record for being the oldest man to win the U.S. trials for the marathon.

So you see my problem. How can work on my computer screen compete with stories on a stage like that? By the way, Immigrationpolicy.org has the complete list of the 38 naturalized athletes. We’re talking U.S. athletes from Somalia to Peru competing in sports from fencing to long distance running. Now that’s a great story.