Gold Medals and the Stories They Tell
February 18, 2002
6:47 a.m.
I'm happy to report that I've just had a really productive weekend. I wrote and rewrote and smoothed and otherwise dismantled and rebuilt about seventy pages of material. I'm pleased with it. The only dark cloud to spoil my run is that I've decided I'll need another small piece of work to tie up a few loose ends at this point. So that's what I'm doing today and tomorrow. Then it's a straight shot of "simple" line-editing another eighty-a hundred pages to the finish line.   I see where the Canadian skaters picked up their gold medals yesterday. I didn't stay up to watch it, but that's fine. I'm glad they got their medal. They deserved it. Perspectives abound in that situation, of course. News reporters have talked about the French commission, and the Russian commission, and the Olympic committee, and how it’s the athletes who are getting rooked here and how that's such a shame. Yes. It's an interesting situation. I don't feel sorry for any of these committees, though. It's their problem. The made their beds, so let them thrash around in them. Perhaps the only perspective that hasn't been investigated, though, is the perspective of the Russian pair. I mentioned it to Lisa the other day. "If I were them I would give the gold medals back," I said. "That's really a hard thing, though," Lisa replied. "I think it would be easier than looking at those gold medals every day and thinking 'hey, there's that gold medal that I didn't really win.'" I can't imagine being in their position and retaining the medals. Actually, if I were them, I would like to think I would have given the Canadian skaters their medals on the podium and had them stand there with me. I'll admit, though, that would have been a hard thing to do--and since nothing had been proven at that point, it would have required altruism that is beyond the pale so to speak. Still... Run time forward thirty years when the colors of the medals don't mean as much. Have those same pairs of skaters look at those medals--Canadians holding the gold that their Russian competitors gave them in face of obvious fraud, Russians holding the silver that they so grandly deserved. What do you think they see, then? How do you think they feel? Who are the winners? And what do you think the message is for the kids and grandkids these skaters tell their stories to?  Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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