How many of you out there have played a competitive sport? I don't mean a sport in which there was competition, but rather a sport in which you had a coach, daily workouts or practices, nutritional education, and supplemental weight training. In that sport, you would have been timed against your previous performance record, you might have been pushed to do laps or consecutive sprints until you occasionally vomited, or you did weight training and practices properly, to the point of muscle exhaustion and not being able to put on your pants without being able to lie down on the floor because you couldn't lift your hands over your head.
Now, I'm not bragging and I wasn't a jock. The last time I engaged in such sports was more than 15 years ago, when I was in boarding school and enrolling in a sport was a requirement. My resting heart rate was 35 and I had a 5% body fat percentage. That was then; in the now, I've got a pretty impressive beer gut and really need to exercise and drop several inches from my mid-section. But that doesn't take away from the fact that my memory of actually having been pushed to the edge of my physical limits within the context of rough, sometime bloody competition.
What did I do? Like Ohno, I participated in an obscure sport requiring a large amount of institutional resources that is generally not only practiced, but only known about by white people. Competitive swimming is a pretty white and upper-class endeavor, but above even that is water polo. In that game, which is basically like soccer in the water, you have to swim back and forth – and when you "rest" you are still treading water. Unlike other, more traditional team sports in which I have participated (like many American kids in the Midwest, I played little league baseball from when I was a little kid), water polo is a game played half out-of-sight, obscured, in secret.
Since it is a game played in the water, you can get away with a lot of things under the water. Like "accidentally" getting kicked in the calf with the ball of an opposing team member's foot to induce a cramp and the inability to swim after him, or getting raked across the chest by a female member of the opposite team (at the "junior varsity" level, some teams were co-ed) when the referee wasn't looking – this was part of the game. You didn't cry and moan about it – you played hard, you played fair, and sometimes players pushed the limits of the rules by giving me an elbow jab in the ribs here, a foot nudge off my hip there, or sometimes a splash in the face when the ball switched hands.
Some cheating is caught by the ref; some ain't. Sometimes I'll get called for something minor, such as holding the ball, even as I had just been elbowed in the gut by the player who had been guarding me. His smile as he backstrokes away? To him, priceless. To me, I want revenge. So if and when I end up on him, I am making sure to return the favor. Does that make me a bad man? And what if the ref catches my act of retaliation, even though he didn't catch the original violation against me? Am I going to go crying home? No – it's part of the game, part of the risk of even trying to retaliate. Sometimes the calls of the ref might even seem partial to the other side. Still, what can I do? I can only go on playing the game. I'm not a politician, an official, or a referee. I'm just an athlete and the only thing I can do is just keep on keeping on.
Does anyone think that short-track figure skating – a sport in which wins are measured in fractions of a second and in which the competitors are close enough to smell what their opponents had for dinner the previous night – is any different? People nudge and bump and check each other incessantly, I hear, and the Korean team is no different, apparently. Their practice of "team play" was mentioned in an interview with a Korean coach, who openly admits that Korean speed skaters routinely "cheat" or at least engage in borderline activities to make sure a Korean wins. Where are the parody songs and protests, then, in response to this news?
For many Koreans, who have never had the chance to engage in a coached, competitive sport – or any sport at all, beside physical education classes at school and pickup games of soccer on the school or university's dirt fields – perhaps this pushing the boundaries of the rules is something unfamiliar. And despite the fervor of Korean sports nationalism, perhaps people take winning too seriously without having had any direct experience of what it takes to get there. Whatever the sport, wherever the field, regardless of the nationality of the athlete – these men and women have spent most of their young lives dedicated to one thing: swimming fast, jumping high, or sprinting in ice skates in a circle as fast as possible without spinning past the capability of your muscles to keep you in the rink. They've sacrificed time playing with friends, free time relaxing and being normal kids, time spent romancing with partners, moments laughing with friends. They've given up many of the things we've take for granted.
So if there's a nudge or a push or the practice of "team play" to get myself or a teammate across the finish line, that's the nature of the game. And considering what an Olympian athlete has given up to even get in the race, are we surprised that they push the boundaries? It is the job of the referees and the judges to keep things fair; if they fail at that job, the athlete is not to blame. And the athlete is not to blame even if they received their medal on a technicality or even because of a bad call. Yes, some of us comfortable spectators sitting in the stands or in front of our televisions might think giving up the medal to another competitor and another country the honorable thing to do, as in the ending of some Hollywood movie, but we it is easy to think clearly, rationally, and so idealistically from the safety and comfort of our living room couches.
I'm not saying that Ohno's decision was fair, or that any specific decision should or should not be reversed, or that giving back or not giving back a medal is necessarily the right thing to do. Every situation is different, bad calls and judgments have been and will continue to be made in big competitive games. I'm just saying – don't blame the guy or gal whose job it is to play hard, fast, and sometimes a bit outside of the rules to win. Am I saying that bending the rules is right? No. What I'm saying is that Ohno's actions were not unusual in the nature of competitive sports, and Koreans engage in such practices as well.
So if the country wants to make songs such as "Fucking U.S.A." and show Koreans' "good sportsmanship" by throwing trash at Americans (as happened in the World Cup 2002 US v. Poland game), or not allowing Americans into stores and restaurants – that's Koreans' choice to do so. But leave Ohno alone. He didn't do anything other than skate as hard and fast as he could to win. And unless you have had bloody scratches across your chest, choked on water splashed down your throat after a ball reversal, been kicked in the gut and even testicles when the ref wasn't looking, or vomited in the shower after the game – I dare say that you don't have any inkling of what it means to be or experience the pressure of being a competitive athlete, let alone an Olympian under the immense pressure of representing an entire country, with the eyes of the world watching, knowing that this race is going to be the culmination of everything you have worked so hard and sacrificed everything for.
I'm not asking Koreans to love Ohno or anyone else who might in the future deprive Korea of a medal on a technicality or even a bad call. I'm not asking Korea to be quiet about protesting bad calls or judgements. File protests, make hate songs, boycott the products of the country in question, if that's what Koreans think best. But have a little empathy for the athlete and just refrain from throwing trash on the man. Ohno – yes, even the evil Ohno – is a human being with human feelings. Does sports nationalism in Korea really blind people to that fact?
UPDATE 3/15: Team USA got beat like a red-headed stepchild at our own game. Congrats, team Korea.
