Written by Among the most, if not the most, intense and competitive athletic events in the world are the U.S. Olympic Team Trials. The reasons are simple enough, every nation has a limitation on Olympic slots, either through qualification or by invitation. The U.S. is a big nation with a large number of athletes offering up a substantial portion of their young lives in hope of earning one of these coveted chances at Olympic glory. The U.S. is also among the minority of nations still highly committed to a trials process. Many other nations use some combination of rankings and committee wisdom to assemble their Olympic Teams, that way accounting for the effect of an injury at the wrong time or a single poor performance from a favored competitor. The majority of U.S. Olympians are picked through a trials process, meaning on the day of the competition the athlete who is the most ready will represent the nation in the next Olympics.
This is not to say that the competition in the U.S. Team Trials is better than in the Olympic Games when the world’s best are assembled. But the intensity of the U.S. Trials process is extreme and in sports where only one or two competitors may go to the Games, that pressure to perform can be its own factor and the line between realizing a lifelong dream or having years of work and sacrifice be for naught can be razor thin.
I’ve been close in two sports’ to the Olympic trials process, wrestling where I competed and saw first hand the gulf between where I was and the level of a champion and where only one American in each weight class qualifies and swimming where I have worked at several trials and only two Americans in each event make the team, among the millions of Americans who swim competitively at any moment. The drama of swimming is particularly affecting in that in nearly every event, all eight swimmers in the finals race flat out to touch the last wall, and then look up at the scoreboard and dissolve into tears. Six into tears of sadness having fallen short and two in tears of joy, having realized their dream in qualifying for the Olympics and having another race on another day.
NBCSN broadcast the U.S. Wrestling Team Trials live and in primetime over this past weekend and the wrestling was brilliant. Remember only the champion in each weight class qualifies for the Olympics and hundreds of competitors step into the circle in a single 48-hour window in a tournament that could render judgment on the years of work that led up to this moment. But the moment for me that is the payoff, the lesson that will resonate through the years, took place not in the competition but immediately after a match.
Kyle Dake, a 30 year-old former two-time world champion in a weight class that has been eliminated, swept in a best 2 of 3 format, Jordan Burroughs, a four-time world champion and 2012 Olympic champion, in Burroughs’ favored weight class of 74Kg. Burroughs, 32, who has been perhaps the best known face in U.S. Olympic wrestling, had been a strong favorite given his many accomplishments, not the least of which was his 7-1 lifetime edge over Dake heading into the competition.
But immediately after eliminating Burroughs, and avenging seven prior losses, Dake did something truly amazing. Rather than immediately bursting into celebration, he reached down to console his accomplished but defeated opponent, Burroughs who remained on his knees a long beat after the final buzzer. This show of respect for his foe, honor for his sport and the sacrifices it demands and of pure sportsmanship will be for me the lasting memory of these Trials and has made me a fan of Dake, who captured in that moment, the true nature of sport. It is not that Dake wasn’t ‘over the moon’ over his good fortune and hard work, he was. It is that Dake knew that his victory was sweeter because of Burroughs’ stature, love of sport, and years of sacrifice, and the universality of the sadness he was feeling in the moment- a sadness Dake had tasted before.
We often make the mistake of trying immunize or deny defeat. This is a terrible mistake that minimizes our own humanity and understanding of the value of sport as a moral and ethical teacher. Winning and losing are fleeting and changeable concepts. But the respect we show for the people with whom we play and with whom we test and measure ourselves and for the sport, itself, are what is lasting. Everyone, from the poet A.E. Houseman to the general, George Patton, who just happened to be an Olympic competitor in the 1912 Stockholm Games, tell us glory, especially sporting glory, is fleeting. Although, I tend to think Mr. Miyagi’s summary on why knowing karate is not a substitute for reason, compassion, or self-restraint, from The Karate Kid, because, “someone always knew more karate,” is the most eloquent of these expressions.
Can an athlete lift all of humanity on his or her shoulders and raise us up? If you’ve read this far, you likely believe that is possible for one to do exactly this. But it is in gestures of radical sportsmanship, like Dake’s, that recognize our shared humanity, the commonality of our sacrifices, and our mutual love of sport, that have the greatest potential to do the heaviest lifting.
Post Script- if you happened to be watching college basketball, during those wrestling Olympic Trials, particularly the NCAA semifinal game between UCLA and Gonzaga, that ended with a Gonzaga buzzer beater in overtime to send the Zags onto the Championship Game, the Daily Coach, of my favorite sites for both daily life and coaching wisdom, features UCLA Coach Mick Cronin showing the other side of Kyle Dake’s graciousness in victory. Cronin identifies that the keys to future triumphs are often born in defeat. “[T]he Bruins’ grit, cohesion and ability to navigate tumult were the ingredients of model leadership and, as Cronin put it, true greatness. That counts for more than what any scoreboard says.”