Picture it: Red Deer, 1992. A young boy, undersized for his age and uncertain of his abilities, steps to the service line on a volleyball court. He has been brought in to close out the first set of an exhibition match. If his serve goes in and he plays solid defence, he will secure a spot as the primary back-row specialist on an elite team competing for Alberta at the Western Canadian finals the following week.

The ball flies off his palm, drifting spinless toward the left side of the court.^{*Which, this site’s countless volleyball-nerd fans can confirm, makes for a more difficult second touch, as the setter must look back over his shoulder to track the first pass and rely on his peripheral vision to target his main options.} Suddenly, as it crosses the net, it knuckles to the left. Out of bounds. The boy hangs his head and lines up to receive serve. He believes, because he must, that he was merely unlucky.

In the second set, he is brought in in the same situation, still undersized for his age an entire paragraph later, and now even more uncertain. He steps to the line. Again he strikes. Again the serve dances setter-side. Again it crosses the net and swerves out of bounds. This time, the coach benches him. His team loses the game, but goes on to win bronze at Western Canadians. Another, taller boy^{*One with a less active serve and less agile defence—not that the shorter boy is bitter or anything.}is the back-row specialist. The boy who missed his serves is only allowed to touch the court in garbage time against a team from a province where volleyballs are scorned as Devil’s Leather. Most of their players have at least one pegleg. His only serve, it need not be said, goes in.

That boy was me. And those chokes were mine.

I detail one of my many teenage humiliations here after spending the past week immersed^{*Having just bought a new TV, I can tell you it’s true: there’s nothing like high-def for enhancing the discomfort inherent to watching male swimmers’ torsos ripple and pre-pubescent female gymnasts contort themselves.} in the quadrennial Canadian ritual of Olympic self-flagellation. Our recurring sin: failing to outperform our way to more trinkets than a nation our size has any right to expect. Wednesday’s supposed national embarrassments included the men’s 4×200m freestyle relay team finishing fifth, Arturo Miranda and Alexandre Despatie also finishing fifth in 3m synchro diving, and fencer Sherraine Schalm getting knocked out in the first round.

After the 4×200 team swam the final in Athens in 2004, Rick Say expressed disgust with their failure to medal—remarks that helped lead to the reform of Swimming Canada (explored in Katharine Dunn’s article in the latest issue of The Walrus). This year, CBC’s Elliot Friedman^{*The best interviewer in Canadian sports broadcasting, by far. He’s sympathetic but never sycophantic, and better yet, asks questions open-ended and specific enough to prompt a far lower percentage of clichés than anyone else. This is known, in athlete-speak, as “squeezing blood from a stone.”} directed his last question at Brian Johns, who swam the only truly subpar leg of the four. Friedman asked Johns how the athletes would respond to suggestions that these Games have been a failure for the swim team because they haven’t won any medals.

Johns responded defiantly, proclaiming that the team were bystanders in Athens, whereas here they were smashing Canadian records, making finals, and competing. CBC then cut back to Ron MacLean, who adopted one of his two more irritating postures, that of Serious Journalist (the other being, of course, Cloying Punster^{*… or should I say Cloying FUNster!!!??? See what I did there? I changed a letter, playing off the expected meaning. If you don’t understand MacLean’s similarly clever puns, I suggest you ask someone who was regarded as funny during the seventeenth century for help.}), grousing that he disagreed with Johns. It was a churlish and unnecessary comment.^{*MacLean alluded specifically to the fact that swimming records are essentially meaningless right now, which is, to be fair, true. They could wrap a lemur in one of those new Speedo suits and toss it in the pool, and it would lay a beatdown on Aquaman. Or should I say FLEETdown!!!??? OR SHOULD I SAY FLEETDROWN!!!??? Man, I see where MacLean is coming from. This stuff is gold.}

Similarly churlish, but understandably so, was fencer Schalm, who looked strong early on but lost her composure toward the end and dropped the match. A choice post-stabfest quote: “It’s like I imagine being a man. It’s like being kicked in the nuts repeatedly, that’s how bad it feels. You feel like you want to curl up and die.”

Olympians: chill. Broadcasters: chill. Canadians: chill.^{*Not you, Feist. You’re too cool as it is.}

There’s a lot of debate in sports over the question of performance in the clutch—whether tense moments do, in fact, cause some to rise and others to fall. As my volleyball anecdote demonstrates,^{*Much better than, say, the example of Alicia Sacramony, the American woman gymnast—mercifully an actual woman, age twenty—who botched her beam and floor routines, gassing any chance her team had at beating China for the gold. Somebody has to bring home the gold for this damn country. Might as well be me, even if it is for ignominy.} the pressure of the moment can influence people to rise or fail. But studies have shown that over time, the number of people who consistently do one or the other is statistically insignificant. That is, given a high sample of “clutch” situations, nearly everyone will thrive some of the time, fail some of the time, and perform to their average most of the time.

In short, what we’re cheering at the Olympics isn’t some symbol of our collective ability to rise to the occasion. When we focus on that, we’re tying our national pride to a moment over which no one has any genuine control. And to say that we ought to be a little less fixated on medal counts—cheering instead the skill and dedication that went into the performance, and by extension sustaining the systems and culture we’ve created for our athletes^{*Watching Canadians chastise athletes about sports they pay no attention to most of the time is like watching a parent mock as weak a child they’ve fed nothing but gruel. Want more archery medals? Earmark some of that hockey season ticket money for bull’s eye incentives. Naming your kid Robin instead of Wayne or Mario would help, too.}—isn’t loser talk. It’s science talk.

I was planning to prove it to myself this summer by going back and seizing that spot on the Alberta midget boys provincial volleyball team—but alas, thanks to a growth spurt at nineteen, my shorts no longer fit.

Bonus birony quote: Final Fantasy’s Owen Pallett: “I’m not into irony, where you pretend you’re serious but you’re not,” he says. “I do satire, where you don’t look serious but you actually are.”

Today’s token blogger self-love: I’m back from vacation, and I didn’t think of you once, dear reader. Too busy thinking about ME. Glorious ME!

Next, on the Bironist: I confess that I thought about you once or twice between tennis games. You weren’t clothed.

Tags: Alexandre Despatie, Arturo Miranda, Beijing Olympics, Brian Johns, CBC, diving, Elliot Friedman, fencing, Ron MacLean, Sherraine Shalm, swimming, Swimming Canada, Team Canada

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Posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 1:44 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.