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Beauty also seems inseparable from excellence. Often the Games provide more than excellence, since mere proficiency presumes existing standards of performance, and some athletes set wholly new standards. "I began to run slowly," Jesse Owens recalled. "Then faster, gaining speed with each step. My legs were moving at top speed now. I came closer and closer to the takeoff board. At the last moment I shortened my stride and hit the board with a pounding right foot. I felt my body rise in the air, and I scissors-kicked at the peak of it, flying 15, then 20, then 25 ft. through the air—straining closer and closer to the towel. And then I landed—past it!"
Reasons to do with individuals, reasons to do with nations. Ever since the Soviets announced their boycott, there has been much talk of holding a nationless Olympics, individuals competing as individuals alone. Such a plan is unlikely to work; people would identify athletes by nationality no matter what colors they wore. In fact, nationalism seems an attraction, not an impediment to the Games. People belong to nations as to families. Things only sour when nationalism brings intentions outside sports. When the Russians bloodied the Hungarians in a water-polo match in 1956, one was not witnessing nationalism but war.
So much importance is given to mere participation. Governments spend a great deal of money and effort for no purpose but showing up, for taking a place in a community of nations. Many African nations see the Games as a chance to become part of international sports. Carlos Giron, a diver from Mexico, views it wider: "You feel like a citizen of the world." Mohammed Abdel Meguid Mohyeldin, secretary-general of the Egyptian Olympic Committee, believes that "participation shows you are interested in humanity, not merely sports."
Such interest creates not one spectacle but two: the spectacle of the Games and that of those watching them. If television cameras had a "reverse gear" that could be applied from country to country, one might see quite a show of Peruvians, Thais and lowans privately gasping and clapping as they watch the action. Excessive communications are said to work against human feelings, but here the effect is the opposite. Not a show of world peace, perhaps, but something valuable, nonetheless, in a shared set of relatively benign emotions on so vast a scale.
Yet the feelings are not entirely formless, either. There are very few historical experiences that the world holds in common. The Olympic Games are one. "A tradition," says George Liveris, president of the Greek Shooting Federation, and once an Olympic participant. "They are the longest lasting social activity that exists." Maybe that accounts for the remarkable success of the American torch relay. On the roads, the cheers for the torchbearers came out sounding like old-fashioned patriotism, but the impulse seemed to go both broader and deeper, to a connection with Greece, with the past, with everyone's past.