They are made to feel the weight of history, blood-stained stones, those of the Hôtel de Ville and Versailles, even Napoleon’s tomb. And the cameras make them look small among so many monuments. Stupid. History is them.
The story is Haile Gebrselassie, who was never an Olympic champion but brought the mystique of Abebe Bikila’s bare feet into the 21st century and gives the three starting baton kicks of the marathon, the race symbolising the Games, man against his limits and thousands of happy fans partying on the pavements and in the stands. The story is Eliud Kipchoge, who comes from the most remote area of Kenya and has already won two Olympic marathons, and at 38 years old he goes out to dance one last tango, knowing that he might not even finish it, and he doesn’t finish it, dead on the slope towards Versailles, where kings and emperors lose their heads, and although instead of Gatto Barbieri’s torn saxophone an accordion sounds next to the Seine, or Astor Piazzola’s bandoneon, Twelfth Night. And the kids who pass him before, just after passing the killer hill at kilometer 28, pat him on the back and shout: What a legend! Part of his privileged skull is covered by a tiara that from a distance shines like a platinum crown, but it is a device with graphite plates that absorbs sweat and evaporates it, cooling him down. And making him smaller.
Nothing is what it seems the last 15 days. Nothing is as it was before. The Games are no longer just a showbusinessa bubble that holds a false reality of flags and medals, a Eurovision festival on a grand scale, a spaceship that lands, or docks like a gigantic cruise ship, in a city and leaves after 15 days without leaving behind any trace other than rubbish and unpayable debts. In Paris, the Games allowed themselves to be invaded by reality, which coloured them, and by life. And in an unexpected symbiosis, they gave back multiplied what they had received. And the debates about things that matter, like that of an African woman, an Algerian boxer whose determination served as a thermometer to measure the extent of the transphobic hate speech of the far-right forces around the world. It all began as an Italian melodrama. One day, the entire transalpine press published that Imane Khalif is intersexual and has so much testosterone in her blood that she punches like a man. The next day, the boxer Angela Carini quits after receiving a punch. She takes off her helmet and cries. I have never been hit so hard, she moans. No one pays attention to scientific explanations, as in the case of, for example, the Spanish athlete María José Martínez Patiño, also intersexual, whose excess testosterone did not translate into physical superiority, because its effects were reduced to her androgenic power, and did not touch the anabolic. The world was divided by Imane Khalif, who, with more strength of character than muscles, resisted, fought and finally won the gold medal. And no one disputes the power she claims.
On July 26, under the deluge on the Seine, there was a click, a moment of rupture like an aneurysm bursting, in the history and tradition of the Olympic Games. It was the parade in mussel boats confiscated from tourists downriver by thousands of athletes, happy young people, children of their time, who happily let themselves be infected by the transgressive spirit of the ceremony that frightens the cavemen, by its republican values, which are already four, liberté, egalité, fraternité, sororité, And every day of the week that begins, Simone Biles insists on continuing to proclaim them in a hall that from the outside looks like a Mayan pyramid. The purely individual struggle of the best gymnast in history to bravely overcome the trauma of Tokyo —a big favorite to win five gold medals and proclaimed the queen of the Games of the pandemic before they even began, the 24-year-old American suffered a crisis of identity, of will, and a depression that crystallized in a few twistiesa loss of orientation in the air in the middle of twists and somersaults in a dangerous exercise: she left it halfway, landed as best she could and gave up— symbolized at first, and then embraced, the collective struggle of women. Her time in Paris is measured, parallel to the three gold medals she won, the most important ones, the general competition, the team event, the vault, in a proclamation of the power of women, of the black power —sharing the final podium with two other black gymnasts, her friend Jordan Chiles and the fabulous Brazilian Rebeca Andrade—, of the sport’s almost revolutionary capacity. “This is who we are,” Andrade summed up transcendently. If you like it, applaud it, if not, swallow it.
The pavilion, fans from all over the world, comes crashing with applause.
At the Stade de France, the largest arena, the French athletes are at the back of the queue, and yet from 10 a.m., when only the less attractive series of events are contested, it is filled with more than 70,000 spectators, and when, around midnight on a Monday, Mondo Duplantis, the stadium god, breaks the world record for the pole vault – eight jumps in four hours to reach 6.25m – he explodes with such energy that it upsets the Swedish athlete from New Orleans, who says: “I have never jumped in such an atmosphere before, what excitement, it was like an American football stadium.” And the joy of the spectators, their ecstasy, soars just as Julien Alfred, a sprinter from St. Lucia, remote from the Antilles island, defeats the media favourite, due to her excessive personality, the American Sha’Carri Richardson, in the final of the 100m; or when Letsile Tebogo, a wonderful sprinter from Botswana who has given up the appeal of North American universities, defeats Noah Lyles, the American who wanted to be Bolt, in the final of the 200m, and only cries and thinks about his mother who died at the age of 43, and the shoes he wears have his date of birth written on them.
Nothing in Paris is what Parisians believed the city they suffer and fear to be like. Many fled the city as if instead of a mass of tourists never seen before, they feared that it would be invaded by Hitler’s army, once again. They feared something worse, almost, frightened before the Games by alarmist reports warning of imminent ruin, unbearable traffic jams, overflowing public transport, attacks, police everywhere, and the poor, the homeless, the ugly, the displaced. And now, from their cabin in the mountains or from the crowded beach bar and impossible beers, they regret having left, because the information they receive speaks of a city in which they feel they have never been. This is how they tell it. The World, Liberationthe press that warned the most about the horror of the Games, the one that surrendered most three weeks later to the magic, cannot be anything else, which in a flash has transformed an aggressive city, full of angry Parisians, into a charm. And they are surprised when they interview tourists on the sidewalks, backpacks, shorts, sneakers, flags and sandwiches, and they tell them how nice the French are, that they thought they were going to mistreat and deceive them, and quite the opposite. Proudly, the Parisians discover that they can be loved. And they even regain faith and believe that one day they will bathe in their still dirty Seine.
Paris is Barcelona, August 1992, with a balloon with a flame rising on the horizon over the Tuileries at dusk, and moving those who look at it, and the world is light, and evil does not exist. It is the Barcelona that is discovered, an aerial parenthesis, of enthusiasm, of fraternal love, in a world where it is very cold, crazy and cruel.
Only the hospitality industry and museums are crying, because Olympic tourists do not have time to fill the terraces along the Seine or to visit it.
It is the achievements of the Olympic athletes, the joy they bring to the hundreds of thousands of fans in Paris and to the billions of television viewers around the world. The story is them, the 80 marathon runners who at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning set out to run 42.195 kilometres and find a city that is alive, awake, vibrant, without hangovers, to which they pay tribute by running harder than ever despite its scary hills. Tamirat Tola, an Ethiopian from the Bikila lineage of Gebrselassie, accelerates just after turning the corner at Versailles at the 28-kilometre wall and no one sees him again, except the crowds crowded on the pavements and in the stands of the Invalides, captivated by the effort of the athletes and the beauty of the race on foot. Tola wins and sets an Olympic record of 2h 6m 26s, and as he enters the final stretch, the last 195 metres, a blue carpet, the television director minimises his figure so that he is devoured in a panoramic shot by the immensity of the golden dome of the secular temple of the Invalides, and as he crosses the line and wants to dedicate a few seconds to himself, to his emotion, to his fatigue, an assistant director brings him, on all fours, a flag of his Ethiopia and, treating him as if he were an actor in a fiction – and fiction is the story of Olympic television – directs his movements, asks him to stand up, to hug the third-placed runner, the Kenyan Benson Kipruto (2h 7m), who has also been provided with a flag. The second-placed runner, the Belgian of Somali origin Bashir Abdi (2h 6m 47s), remains out of the frame. The director had not foreseen that he would need a Belgian flag.
Tariku Novales, the Galician marathon runner, is also not in the picture. He arrives very late, exhausted, limping and morally defeated. “I am sad and ashamed of myself. I wanted to hide from everyone,” he says, his trainers in his hand, his white socks red with blood. “I don’t know why I finished. It’s no use to me.” And he is not even consoled by the fact that his friend Tamirat won.
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