As those of you who are avid readers of our newsletter, The Courier, will no doubt already know, this week my coworker and I contracted COVID-19 (In 2024, yes, I know!).

Turns out, when you largely abandon any tangible efforts to stymie the spread of a massively infectious disease, it does what massively infectious diseases tend to do, which is—uh—spread.

So yeah, I have COVID, and it sucks. It sucked when I got it in 2022 and couldn’t breathe for three weeks and decided to immiserate myself further by rewatching all of Evangelion. It also sucked in 2023 when I got it and couldn’t get out of bed for ten days and committed to immiserating myself further by catching up on Doctor Who, but at least then I had a woman sending me pictures of her boobs.

Now, in 2024, it still sucks. I’ve gotten real acquainted with the exact dimensions of my new apartment. I have watched more House M.D. than most people probably should in any five-day span of time. I completed the Fortnite Battle Pass yesterday because frankly, I also need things to do other than answer emails for Arthur.

I recognize I’m lucky in a lot of ways: I have the flexibility of both being my own boss and being able to work remotely. That in itself is a massive privilege. Even so, we are all susceptible to boredom, and being sick, well—it still sucks, no matter how much dispensation you have to blog about it.

Yet here I am, blogging nonetheless, because I have discovered a focus for my inactivity. That’s right, baby, the thing I forget happens every four years is finally happening again. The Olympic games are starting in like…*checks watch* umm a couple days ago.

I know. I’ve said before that I’m not a “sporty” person. I am also not a team player. I could never play for team Canada.

But watching them? Watching them is another matter entirely.

I wrote last summer about how much I enjoy watching rugby, though if I’m being honest provided enough time and context I can find myself getting invested in any number of other sports.

For instance, I voraciously watch literally any rock climbing documentary I can get my hands on, no matter how terrible. I am fascinated by the technical intricacies of the sport, and the apparent disregard of those who practice it for their own self-preservation. I think what good climbing docs do well is to capture the stories that weave the sport and the community surrounding it together.

What are sports if not narratives, after all? If all the world's a stage, then it stands that the rules of sport serve akin to the prompt at the start of an improv show—shaping a narrative which emerges from the play between the men and women on the field. 

Part of the reason I think rugby is so particularly compelling to me is that it is a sport that has been afforded so much time for narratives to emerge within it. Tournaments like the annual Six Nations Championship and its Southern Hemisphere equivalent Rugby Championship have played host to some of the most famous and long-running rivalries in the sport, with titles being contested between the best of the best in international rugby standings.

 There’s an inherent drama to seeing these teams come head-to-head, to seeing England and Scotland vie to take home the Calcutta Cup, to watch Wales go from a Grand Slam-winning superpower to a scrappy team of new blood desperately trying not be be bowled over by the juggernaut that is the current team Ireland, and of course to watch just about any team go up against the force of nature that is New Zealand. 

This has been a great summer for me, therefore. In July, I saw team Scotland decimate Canada in an international exhibition rugby game. Then, I got to see the English football team get schmucked in the Euros despite their fans' insistence that this was the year that football was going to finally come home.

Football did not, in fact, come home.

All of this would have been plenty enough to sate me, most fairweather of fairweather sports enthusiasts. What I’d forgotten, however, was that we had a whole other sporting extravaganza set to overshadow all the somewhat pedestrian tournaments I’d relished thus far.

The Olympics are like the RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars of sports. All your favourites are back, all the old rivalries re-emerge, and the budget is way bigger than the shoestring that they usually get. I hope this metaphor is apt, as I’ve never once watched Drag Race in my life, and I’m not about to start for this.

Unlike the annual tournaments which we’re used to—The NHL Playoffs, the Champions League and the like—the Olympics define themselves by pageantry. Everything looks expensive. Everything feels expensive, from the $400 fugly Team Canada uniforms, to the gold-themed TV bumpers, to the fact that CBC inexplicably has four people commentating on the opening ceremonies.

It’s a kind of con; an exercise in decadence and conspicuously wasteful public spending which lets us imagine, for a couple weeks, what it might be like to have a functional economy.

Of course, if you’re lucky, your city might get a couple stadiums and a marginally improved commuter transit system out of it—provided, of course, they play host. Alternatively, the games could also turn out to be a massive infrastructural nightmare wrapped in a three-week traffic jam that also cripple the municipal economy for the next fourty years, all so that Imagine Dragons have somewhere to play on their next international tour.

The Olympics are an exercise in curated artifice; the ultimate spectacle. A lot of glitz and loud music and flashy colours and instructions to the camera crew to never pan too far to the left. 

And while I’m fully aware that the Olympics are, to some extent, a bourgeois neoliberal exercise in laundering consent, I’ll be damned if I don’t like watching some guys go fast.

For all the crimes of Liberalism for which I hold the Olympics to blame, it’s hard not to get drawn up in the narrative of it all. Like most people who were in the Canadian public education system in the early twenty-teens, I certainly remember where I was when Sidney Crosby scored the Vancouver games’ gold medal-winning overtime goal.

Growing up, watching the Olympics was just about the only time that my parents would permit the TV on outside of the allotted one hour of “screen time” my brother and I received, such was the significance of the games as an event of singular cultural importance.

For the entire duration of the tournament our living room TV would be on, my parents coming in every so often to change the channel to a different piece of CBC coverage while my brother and I sat, slack-jawed, watching some sport of which neither of us had ever really heard before.

However, to me, that has always been one of the greatest appeals of the tournament. While the Olympics, as one of the biggest sporting events in the world, possess the power to magnify the narratives intrinsic to their constituent disciplines a hundred fold, they equally possess a power unique from all other tournaments of their kind: to highlight the underdogs.

Admittedly, part of the reason that I watch rugby and football with my dad is simply because I grew up doing so, just as the reason my parents would always favour the Winter Olympics, spending whole afternoons in front of the TV watching downhill racing because my mom is a former ski racer.

We tend to gravitate towards that which is familiar, and that is a bias that is inextricable from my feelings towards, for example, anything to do with the sport of rugby.

By the nature of Olympic coverage, however—especially prior to the multi-feed, near-universal access which streaming provides—you just have to watch whatever’s on.

For example: as I write this I’m watching the Men’s Canoe Slalom final. I know sweet fuck all about Canoe Slalom, but I do get a kick out of watching guys in piddly little boats launch themselves down an inclined tank of whitewater with what I’d characterize as “reckless” abandon.

Plus, I have COVID, so it’s not as though I’ve much better to do.

In recent years, as my politics have skewed increasingly towards the adjectives “avowed” and “left,” I’ve noticed that my admiration for the underdogs has only increased. Given that I’m a person who thinks that Settler Colonialism is bad, actually, and that nationalism has fueled the fires of some historically very worrisome political movements, I’ve been surprisingly disinclined to cheer for the Settler Colonial state in which I just so happen to live.

I’ve got a lot of time for Canadian athletes, sure (who among us is not won over by Andre De Grasse), but as a rule I’m somewhat indifferent towards our national team. I mean, even by the standards of its status as an ontologically evil settler state, Canada doesn’t have that much going for it. Our national anthem sucks (except in French), and as befitting our whole stereotypically-polite shtick we’re not even exceedingly committed to fostering ideas of national exceptionalism.

At least when it comes to doing weird sporting pseudo-nationalism, the United States and Great Britain are committed to the bit.

Because the country of my indirect provenance from which I yet consider myself largely “from” is not represented on the Olympic stage, however, I tend to find myself instead rooting for whoever seems to be having the best time.

Remember in the 2020 Men’s Long Jump finals when that hyperexcitable Italian man and the Qatari athlete with the cool shades shook for the Gold medal? Was that not one of the most moments in sports, ever? Now imagine, if you will, if you’d just been pissed that the British guy didn’t win. Would’ve sucked, wouldn’t it?

In my mind, being too entrenched in one’s national sympathies narrows the degree to which one can appreciate the multi-week prestige television event which is the Olympic games. You’ve got to roll with it, man, take the good with the bad. 

While I was watching Canoe Slalom while writing this, the very last guy to go, with the odds stacked against him, managed to wrestle out a flawless run two seconds under the time to beat, winning him the gold medal. He was French, but what do I care, really? He was happy, so I’m happy. We all get to be happy. 

I get that this “Go Sports Team!” mentality is a hard sell for a lot of people, but try and broaden your horizons a bit. To most people watching the Olympics, the majority of the sports are going to be unfamiliar. You can either go into them with an appreciation for the team—firmly entrenching yourself in the fate of the Canadian(s) who are, statistically speaking, not all that likely to win gold—or you can commit yourself to appreciating the sport.

My favourite event at the Tokyo 2020 games was Women’s Sport Climbing. I sort of telegraphed as much when I made my earlier disclosure about climbing docs. Sport Climbing appeals to me as it tests a lot of different requisite proficiencies. You see fast climbers, technical climbers, and all-arounders who power through thanks to incredible stamina. 

I like the womens’ events because I am a lesbian.

Sport climbing is superficially kind of boring. While the first round, speed climbing, is frenetic as two competitors scrabble side-by-side up a sheer wall, the second round, bouldering, is where things tend to grind to a halt.

Bouldering involves a series of climbs (called “problems”) of increasing difficulty that are unharnessed, low to the ground, but extremely technical. It involves a lot of watching people step up to a wall, fall off, and do that over and over again.

Yet when it all comes together, it’s incredible. Watching someone clear a difficult problem for the first time is electric. It contextualizes the half-hour of watching other people try and fail, which makes the payoff for it all the more sweet.

These are the kinds of stories that only the Olympics can provide.

When I used to curl in Ottawa, my curling club would always see a massive influx of people after the Winter games of a given year. For many, the Olympics were the first time they’d ever paid attention to curling in their life. They’d be enchanted by the speed and intensity of it, by the intricate plotting required to line up and deliver shots, by the seamlessness with which all the parts came together.

Beginner curling is not at all like that, obviously. It’s a lot of falling over and throwing rocks wince-inducingly hard into the opposite hack, and half-hearted brushing that lacks the discipline and power of a team of Olympic sweepers.

Still, a lot of the people who persevered with it did so because they wanted to be that good, one day. Certainly I know I did. 

It helps that I had the chance, on numerous occasions, to curl with and be coached by people who had curled in the Olympic games. It takes everything back down to Earth, makes you realize that everyone on TV is just a normal person who just so happens to be able to run really fast, kick a ball real hard, or whatever it is you do in discus.

I’ve had that “this could be me moment” a couple of times now, first as a competitive swimmer in middle school, and later as a curler of less competitive mettle in high school. I wonder, to this day, whether part of my ongoing fascination with the OIympics is a vicarious desire to see myself therein.

Eventually, I dropped out of swimming not because I was consistently beating everyone in Ottawa (I was) but because I didn’t like the feeling of my bare chest in the pool. I’d later drop out of curling because a pandemic happened and in the interim I’d decided to become a woman.

I will never be in the Olympics for certain now, not just because I’m nowhere near athletic enough and I’ve decided, against all advice, to write for a living, but also because the IOC has conspired to ban women like me from competition.

Like this article, I’ve come full circle on the Olympics. They’re not as shiny as they were in 2010.

Even still, they continue to entrance me as a sort of dream factory—a suspension from reality and the evils of the structures they themselves in many ways prop up. 

It’d be remiss to not mention that this is an Olympics conducted against the backdrop of a genocide perpetuated by one of the nations competing, who have thus far refused to honour the traditional Olympic truce.

It is an Olympics which postures towards notions of “decolonization,” hosted by the country responsible for one of the most prolific and oppressive colonial empires in history. Rather than being apolitical as so many would like to believe, the Olympics are necessarily a product and a determinant of global politics. Now seems a good time to remind you they let the Nazis host them in 1936!

However if there’s one good thing one can take from this narrative which surrounds the games, it’s that there is hope for the underdogs. I am far from the only one who feels increasingly ambivalent towards the Canadian Olympic team.

I know a lot of people are going to be cheering for Palestine this year.

For as much as they are a distraction—a dream, if you will—what the Olympics represent is still ultimately something good. Unity, determination, hope. These are the things for which the dream factory stands.

Even as a piece of national political artifice, the Olympics represent the hope that things could be better. We all want to see ourselves in the Olympics because we all want to see ourselves win. I would like to think that as a political end, that might be applied to better our world.

For better or worse, the Olympics are here. We’ve got another three weeks of them, and CBC is a lot cheaper than a Netflix subscription. I suppose writing an article about the Olympics largely because I have COVID and have nothing better to do is the definition of “making the most of it,” but then again, aren’t we all?