What we can learn from the indomitable Olympian


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I had a relatively uneventful summer. I traveled for an annual family reunion and got to swim in Lake Michigan. I saw a baseball game. And then I sat in my home in Reno, Nev., where the only affordable, interesting thing to do for people who don’t want to hike is go to Walmart to people watch right before Burning Man. I read books, I knitted, I called my college friends and daydreamed about showing them around town. I started watching “Gossip Girl” with my mom and discussed the poor timing of her current Blake Lively phase. But primarily, I was gripped with boredom and a desire to be elsewhere.

Underneath all that boredom, or rather, woven within it — aided by it — was an obsession that occupied my dreams and many of my waking thoughts. My social media was populated with information about it, I texted with my friends about every detail and I learned as many fun facts about it as I could. This past August was the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics and Paralympics, and it was the most thoroughly I have been able to enjoy the Olympics yet.

I am an athlete, and an incredibly devoted one, at that, as a member of the Lawrence fencing team. But for most of my life, fencing had been the exception to the rule that I was not a sports fan. This meant — and for the most part still applies — that the only major televised sporting event I ever cared about was the Olympics, because that is pretty much the only time when fencing is on TV in the United States. However, in previous years, I have never had the knowledge nor the time to sit down and intentionally watch hours and hours of fencing bouts between people who were not American.

This Olympics was different, for multiple reasons. For one, I have become much more interested in watching other sports besides fencing in recent years, including swimming, tennis and even basketball, so there was much more for me to enjoy besides what I previously had exclusively been comfortable with. Secondly, I was finally well-versed enough in my own sport outside of myself to know what was happening: who to pay attention to, which countries to look out for, what rules and controversies had been happening. Without me even noticing, I had become much more connected to the international fencing community online and had given myself a comprehensive education on all the interesting things happening in the broader fencing world outside of my own club and local tournaments. Watching the Paris Olympics, I knew important names, I recognized coaches’ faces and I could pick out national stylistic differences, all of which I never could have done four years earlier. Thus, the Olympics was something I looked forward to and felt wildly passionate about for the few weeks that it graced my TV set this summer.

Even without the sports knowledge, since I could remember, the concept of the Olympics always made me choke up a bit. Of course, the Olympic-themed advertising is designed to tug at the heart strings, but the idea of a world united to see the most devoted athletes of every nation display their hard-earned abilities makes me tear up more than I think the average folk does. There are always, of course, the triumphant and inspiring stories of poverty and war overcome for the sake of passion and glory, which remind the world of the indomitable human spirit (a concept which my tear ducts often just can’t handle).

But also, as a fencer, I have come to understand something which I think non-athletes and even others in different sports might not have the same awareness of. Fencing is a small sport; American fencing Summer Nationals is repeatedly one of the largest fencing tournaments in the entire world, bringing together young beginning-level fencers with literal Olympians to compete in the same convention center at the same time. Similarly, though Lawrence is only technically a Division III NCAA school, there are simply not enough NCAA fencing teams in the nation to constitute separating the divisions, so us Lawrence fencers directly compete against Division I schools, which often have world-team members and even Olympians. So having grown up within this community where ultimate beginners compete in the same events as world champions and everything in between, I have a special sense of the concept that even world-class, Olympic- level athletes are normal people. They have day jobs, they go to school, they worry about what outfits to wear and sometimes they have financial problems. Perhaps I even have an inflated sense that anyone around me, including myself, with enough dedication, can get to the very top.

Perhaps the fencing world is simply particularly small and it’s made me biased, but I tend to apply this same reasoning when I see someone from a relatively small country or competing in a lesser-known sport win a medal. That person is a normal folk; they probably have friends who know nothing about their sport and teachers who may not have been aware of their summer plans. That normal folk, however, has worked incredibly hard and overcome countless obstacles to represent their home, and they have earned the adoration and respect of the entire world, even just for a moment. I don’t know if this is how it works for other sports, but in fencing, all those normal folks will have the letters “OLY” next to their name in articles and rosters for the rest of their lives, whether they medal or not. That is an honor not achieved by mere notoriety or the strokes of luck associated with celebrity, but with the pure passion embodied in the sweat on their backs.

Lawrence University is a school that oozes with passion. I feel it every time I go to an upper-level class, every time I hear an instrument being played and every time I see athletes walking around in their matching gear. So, as we carry out this splendid new school year, I would encourage you to remember the indomitable Olympian: just a regular folk who sweated enough to be able to go in front of the whole world and accomplish something excellent and spectacularly human. All of us can find that spectacular human excellence within ourselves, and hopefully we can embody it in everything we are passionate about.