medal hunt

Olympics jail is closing in on me. My Olympics partner wants to watch Michael Phelps try to make history with his quest for eight gold medals. For some reason I don’t find the pursuit all that compelling. It’s nice, I suppose that this hometown boy is trying to win eight races. But the thousandths of a second the timing is down to make victory feel almost inconsequential. How, I wonder, can we just keep going faster and faster? Is there no ceiling, or floor rather since the numbers keep sinking lower, to how fast human beings will eventually be able to swim? Will we soon see the 100 meters won in 11.27 seconds? Will swimmers one day finish races before they even enter the water? I don’t have anything against competition. And I adore all the pomp and circumstance and ritual and challenge attending the Olympic games. Somehow, though, the Phelps set up feels too culturally loaded. The deal being made of his medal hunt feels too much like it comes not from him but from some newsish desire to create a 2008 hero after the grueling primary season that gave us an old man and a black guy, after the last seven and a half years of an oaf in the White House, after five years of endless war. It’s a pseudo-event waiting to crack apart. I want to see Phelps race. But I just want to see him swim his best in a field of swimmers also doing their best. It’s not that I don’t care whether he wins. But the medal count jingoism feels dangerous and explosive.