Simone Biles’s return. Competitors agreeing to a gold medal tie. A runner who fell but still won her race. The Tokyo Olympics have been a showcase for the beauty of resilience.
For all the controversy, for all the well-founded worry over hosting the Summer Games amid a pandemic that has killed four million globally and is currently lashing Japan, Olympic athletes have delivered again and again. I’m not talking only about medal counts and world records here. I’m talking about something more profound. I’m talking about resilience, tenacious fortitude and even kindness under pressure. All are forms of athletic grace. In Tokyo over the last week and a half, the examples kept multiplying. The grace of Simone Biles, bold as she came back to the fray, winning a bronze medal on the balance beam days after pulling out of the team gymnastics competition to guard her mental, emotional and physical health. The grace of the Netherlands’ Sifan Hassan, stumbling and sprawling on the track during her heat of the women’s 1,500 meters, then lifting herself and striding from far behind to catch the other runners, passing them all to finish first. The grace in how athletes have pulled together in Tokyo, encouraged to do so because during the pandemic they leaned on others more than ever before. One example among many: the Norwegian triathlete Lotte Miller consoling Belgium’s Claire Michel, as Michel sobbed in the moments after finishing last. The grace in how athletes made it through the pandemic, their elite-level training disrupted. In Tokyo, there are countless stories of how they stayed in shape and kept their form. Think of the weight lifter Hidilyn Diaz. She spent months stuck in Malaysia because of the pandemic, freelancing her training, building her own gym and working on weight sets she fashioned out of bamboo sticks and jugs of water. In Tokyo last week, Diaz became the first athlete to win a gold medal for the Philippines. She personified resilience, a description the International Olympic Committee has often applied to these Summer Games, as they went forward in a time of plague.
