It’s that time of every-four-years again: The Winter Olympics.
Although I definitely enjoyed cheering on Shaun White’s snowboarding tricks and trying to figure out what exactly “curling” involves, the segment of the Olympics that I actually watched the most of was the Parade of Nations. While I found the opening ceremonies themselves a little strange — particularly that dancing butterfly-looking guy — the chance to see athletes from more than 80 countries represented at once is always fascinating to me.
This time around, one thing that particularly interested me was the representation from countries that were too warm to possibly have any ski slopes such as Ghana and Ethiopia. The commentators mentioned that many of these people grew up and trained in the United States or a Northern European country and didn’t have much contact with the people of the country that they represented.
As the team from the United States paraded past, I felt a little surge of national pride even though I don’t think I’d ever heard of any of these people. After all, they were “my team.” I inwardly wished luck to any team I had some sort of association to, from the German team, with whom I share one-quarter heritage, to the Hungarian team, because of the mission trip that I went on in tenth grade to Budapest. I’m sure it wasn’t fair to the Spain team for me not to want their victory, considering that I could just as easily have taken Spanish in high school as taken French. As it was, I always rooted for the French when there weren’t any Americans to speak of.
It’s a funny thing, nationalism. I may have been watching the most selfish or most vain person alive in an ice dancing competition against the next Mother Teresa, and would have wanted the self-centered one to win. It’s a ridiculous example, and I know all of these athletes worked tirelessly to get where they are, but I really don’t know anything about the character of anyone I was cheering for and barely anything about their personality. I judge them by their smile, how they outwardly react to hearing scores and what little flag appears next to their name on the rankings. It’s really not fair.
Granted, whether or not an athlete has my support doesn’t have any bearing on whether or not he or she gets a medal. Even though I’d like to think that yelling at the TV counts as legitimate moral support for Team USA, they’ll make it or break it on their own. Still, I wouldn’t cheer for an American politician who wasn’t morally right, and it’s strange to think that I don’t know what Olympic athletes share my values.
Should it matter? After all, this is just sports we’re talking about. Nothing they do is likely to affect our direction as a country. Still, these people are representing us, and whatever they do will be seen by the entire world — is it enough that they can do awesome flips, or should they also have awesome principles?
