An Olympic ideal

Originally appeared on spirituality.com

For all the complexity and commercialization swirling around the run up to the Olympic Games, there remains at the heart of the Games a wonderful, and wonderfully simple, ideal: the pursuit of excellence.

In sport, as in the rest of life, it’s a pursuit that lifts us all. Potentially, and sometimes actually, it fuels a healthy spirit of global competition and, at the same time, of cooperation among both athletes and spectators. Often, this ideal fosters a kind of oasis in which the games become—however briefly—a refuge from a world that seems overburdened with troubles.

I can go for years at a time without keeping track of who won the World Cup in figure skating, freestyle skiing, or skeleton. Hey, I can go for years at a time and not even know if they have a World Cup for some Olympic events.

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