I played soccer for most of my life until an ankle injury/a terrible, demoralizing, creepy coach ended my career. I was never a great player, but I was surprisingly fast, surprisingly tough for someone shorter than most of the other girls on the field. It didn’t matter that I had no hand eye coordination (except for that one time in 3rd grade when my coach inexplicably decided to put in me goal to “try it out” and I let in approximately 6 goals in one quarter and came off the field at half-time glaring at him and telling him that if he EVER did that again I would sit by the goal post and we’d see how his experiment would go THEN). Because I was so small, I got pushed over a lot, but I got very good at doing a sort of roll and spring back up thing that always surprised the people I was playing against. I was scrappy, basically, and soccer was important to me.
I remember the 1999 World Cup very vividly. It was an important moment in my life, to see people talking about female athletes that positively and with that much enthusiasm. I was 11 at the time, and both my sisters also played soccer. It was a family event, watching those games, and when Brandi Chastain made that penalty shot we jumped around our living room hugging each other and cheering and being so proud of our country and our sport.
Which leads me to the Olympic memory that has been whirling around in my head for days: the 2004 Women’s soccer medal ceremony. It was the last hurrah for that core of women who had been my heroes, Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain, Joy Fawcett, Julie Foudy, and Kristine Lilly. So when they won the gold medal, the whole team climbed onto the medal stand, linked arms, and just belted the national anthem. They were awful, but it was beautiful, and I cried like a baby.
It’s a summer Olympic memory, obviously, and I don’t really know why I’ve been thinking about it. I guess it’s because I’ve been sort of wondering why the Olympics have always meant so much to me.
The 1996 Olympics were my first experience with obsessive fandom. (I think I taped every single hour of NBC coverage that year (without their expressed written consent, because I was a rebel). I had books about athletes, I knew absolutely everything about the Magnificent 7 (the gymnastics team, not the movie), I read every word of the newspaper sports page and cut things out of it to save. I loved it. And I think, in retrospect, some of my wonder and fascination was the novelty of seeing grown-up, women athletes respected and celebrated. At the time, though, I just felt the pull of patriotism and team work.
I’m a sucker for teams. Despite a sort of natural tendency towards solitude, I am most proud of myself and my work when I am contributing to a team, when people depend on me and I am forced to depend on others. My favorite movies, my favorite TV shows, my favorite books… they almost always feature some sort of team, some sort of self-made family. The Olympics are like my ultimate reality show dream, because everyone belongs to a team, and every victory is about more than that individual’s success.
And so, I will miss these Olympics. Yes, even curling. I still say some chimney sweeps happened upon a giant’s dart board and decided to go ice bowling, but I will still miss it.
I can remember feeling overwhelmed in 1996 by the scope of the thing, by the ability of people and countries to put aside their difference even if it was just for two weeks and try and do something bigger than themselves. I felt proud, and not just of my teams, of the United States– I was proud of people. I know now of course that the Olympics aren’t as pure and simple as I thought they were when I was 8.
But I can’t quite let go of that feeling.
