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Much of the appeal of the Olympics centers on individual heroes, yet heroism in the Games is lightweight; it bears none of the mythic armor of professional sports. With professional athletes, allegories develop with the records; Mantle was pain, Unitas skill, Ali poetry and power. The Olympic Games are too brief for spectators to construct a folklore. Personalities like Nadia float to the top for a few days, but only as they are attached to performances. The hero and the act are one. If an allegorical hero is to be found in the Games, it is youth in general. A time of life is held still. For two weeks nothing ages; at least that is the illusion. The Olympics make the illusion grand. All the world agrees to it.
Individuals compete with one another; that accounts for the Games' appeal as well. Some athletes claim to be oblivious of the competition, but the audience never is. One need not argue the merits of winning or playing the game. The fact is that the sight of someone winning is a pleasurable thing. A rarity of the times, it is clean and unambiguous. So is losing.
In any Olympic event there is at least one athlete who does not expect to lose. Not she. She has never lost. Yet she will lose today. She will pit her enormous will against her battered body, and come in second, third or ninth. One looks for the shock on her face, beneath the fatigue or despair. The shock is everyone's.
Individuals also compete against themselves, and the selves are complicated. "More than an athlete, I'm a human being," said John Carlos. "I have emotions, needs, wants. I got the whole shot." In every volleyball game, in every foot race one sees the whole shot: mind over matter, mind over mind. John Landy turns his head; Roger Bannister shoots by. On the field it often seems more than a struggle for victory; it seems a struggle for a place in the world, self-assertion through combat. Sometimes it looks sublime—in a dive off the 10-meter platform, on the parallel bars. Sometimes it looks dispassionately cruel. Either way the struggle wins the affection of the crowd, which sees in the exercise of discipline a morality play not necessarily related to sports. Throats go dry merely because a fellow human being is doing all that is remotely possible.