The Measure of a Medal

Gold, silver, bronze. Three winners. Lots of athletes with no medals.

In a recent blog, Denica McCall reminded us that not everyone gets medals. No one got an Olympic medal just for showing up in Vancouver. Broken hearted competitors, coaches, and parents watched as dreams were shattered over a hundredth of a second, a triple jump gone wrong, a skater who got too close, a skier flagged on her final run. These athletes were not just really good; they were the best in their sports. But they lost. And for these athletes, the next season doesn’t air for another four years.

No one can watch the Olympics and not be mindful of the cost. Most of these young people have been training seriously since youth, many leaving homes and countries for the sake of the goal. They submit their lives to coaches and forego normal lives. They train at levels most can’t conceive of. A typical figure skater has six different coaches. In one session on the ice, a skater performs 125-175 jumps and can land at a force seven times their body weight. They train six days a week. Michael Phelps once said that every day he wasn’t training was a day he was moving away from his Olympic goal.

Thousands of training hours later, they are one fall away from achieving their dream. The cost is exceedingly high. There may be a recompense for the athlete that gets a medal, a taste of fame and fortune for those standing on the podium. But there is no such payback for those that don’t place–unless the training is a reward of its own. The Olympic athletes have a passion that drives their training and reconciles the cost. They don’t train just to win a prize; they train because they love their sport and have decided that it is worth laying down their lives to pursue what they love. America loves the Olympics because they love watching people doing what they love.

The Olympics are a great example of passionate people training passionately. We need to watch them for more than mere entertainment. What if we watched them with our children and showed them it is possible to choose passion instead of passivity? What if we encouraged our children to train at levels that will make a difference, not in the world of figure skating, but in the world of economic, political, environmental and health related problems? If young people can lay down their lives for a dream that can be shattered with one fall, surely they can be encouraged to do the same for a dream of enduring value.

In this age of entitlement, what if we raise up those who expect to train harder than anyone else? What if we teach our children that a disciplined lifestyle and submission to “trainers” will help them reach dreams others will never achieve? What if we teach them to choose hard things? Perhaps we will have young men and women postured to handle the challenges of the day, those who understand the times and know what to do. That kind of dream will never be measured in gold, silver or bronze. No fall can ever take it away.