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COVER
STORY: OLYMPICS SPECIAL
A
Fine Humanity
Terry
Walsh, Australia's hockey coach tells it best. A week earlier, as promised,
he called all 24 of his squad to say just one thing: yes or no, Olympian
or not. Now he says to me, "Emotionally, it's akin to a loss."
And he's not talking about the loss of a game.
But still
they come, and it is like a calling you cannot hear. It is why Marla Runyan,
1500 m runner, who sees her opponents as streaks of light because she's
legally blind, keeps running; it's why Dan Perkins, just recovered from
brain cancer; keeps rowing. They know it takes heart. Even if it's on
the wrong side. Like long-distance runner Joseph Guillemot who smoked
a pack a day, whose heart was on his right side, but who never stopped.
Guillemot
won gold, in the 5000 m at the Antwerp Olympics, but Runyan won't and
nor will Perkins. It does not matter for as the Games unfold, they are
its beating heart. If Michael Johnson ran the 400 m alone, one man in
eight lanes, who would watch?
We live
in times when the medal is the only measurement of success, and it is
all not bad. As Johnson pushes the envelope of human possibility he is
to be admired for he evokes the spirit of Faster, Higher, Stronger. But
the powerful lure of victory, be it a magazine cover or a million-dollar
endorsement, has left the Olympics tainted by corruption, for the chemically-fuelled
athlete is the Games' ugliest wart. They said the Olympics were about
romance, but now only an illusion remains.
But sometimes
we are confronted by an act of purity that stuns the senses, that resuscitates
our belief in the Olympic ideal, and so often it comes from the unknown
athlete. This year during the trials for the US taekwondo team for Sydney,
Esther Kim met her best friend Kay Poe in the flyweight final.
Poe was
more gifted but an injury to her knee had killed her chance. Till Kim
voluntarily forfeited the final so that Poe would go to Sydney. "She
has a better chance for a medal," said Kim. Kim gives us hope. That
for all the frailties of the Olympic movement-the indifference to drug
use, the bribery involved to host the Games, the fixing of boxing matches-there
will be athletes who provide redemption. Some whom we know because they
win, their heroism and grit spread over our front pages; and some whom
we won't because they won't win, but whose courage brings to the Games
a fine humanity. Like Derek Redmond.
Injured
again and again and again, forced to withdraw from the Seoul Olympics
minutes before his 400 m heat, Redmond arrived in Barcelona 1992 with
a mission. For years his father Jim had supported him and now it was time,
he said, to win, to honour his father.
But 140
m into the final, his hamstring tore, he fell to the ground. But he did
not lie there, he picked himself up and began to hobble agonisingly down
the track. Jim, stunned, leapt over the fence, dodged security, ran onto
the track and told his son, "You don't have to do this."
"Yes,"
replied the son, who knew to be an Olympian was to complete the course,
"I have to finish."
And so the
father held the son. And the son wept like a child. And they walked together,
down the track. Till right at the end, when the father let go, so that
his son could cross the line alone.
Derek Redmond
was a failure. And maybe not. He came to the Olympics and he finished
what he started.
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