The Greatest Olympian: Jones’ Argument
Sports commentator Bomani Jones was asked whether Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt was the greatest Olympian. Phelps has 30 medals. Bolt has fewer than ten.
However, Jones said that it was Usain Bolt because everyone can run. Only a few have access to a swimming pool or have the time to learn to swim the butterfly.
Therefore, Jones argued, Usain Bolt is the greater Olympian, because he is competing against a larger pool of potential competitors. As we move toward the Summer Olympics in Paris. It would be nice to rethink our sports from within yet another value system.
The Greatest Olympian: Strength and Speed in Sports
Strength is a beautiful thing as is speed. Our Olympian men have it! They can run; they can jump. Our women have it, too. We watch them ride cycles and spike a volleyball, and now even watch women knock one another about in boxing. Then again, there is grace. It isn’t considered a big deal in most men’s sports.
We don’t give Muhammad Ali more points than Joe Frazier just because he could float like a butterfly. All we care about in boxing is who is still standing at the end of the match.
This means that the ability to absorb a punch or deliver a shattering right cross is as important or more important than the capacity to dance about the ring. We all know that Carmelo Anthony had a beautiful jump shot, but as far as the sport of basketball went it only mattered if the ball went in.
What about rhythmic gymnastics? It features largely young Russian and Eastern European women and girls competing with a ball, a hoop, and a ribbon. The dazzling and fascinating displays of difficult skills that few have the time or the comprehension to learn, interest me precisely because of the rarity of the grace on display.
It’s true that almost everyone can run and that almost no one can throw a hoop fifty feet in the air, roll on the floor, spin and catch the hoop on the back of their left leg, bounce it, and then rise as it lands around their neck, just as they begin a leaping set of cartwheels.
The Appeal of Rhythmic Gymnastics
In rhythmic gymnastics, you can see women, sometimes in teams, sometimes alone, inscribing the air with fantastic geometrical designs that are stunning in their inventiveness. Few have had the time to practice this sport or have the wherewithal to compete, but the sport activates an aspect of the sport that is just below the surface and brings it into view.
We like the long bomb in football, and a sixty-yard toss can be thrilling, but the points are the same whether it is a pinpoint pass or three yards and a pile-up of bodies in the endzone. Beauty and drama are often part of sport but are not usually an aspect of the scoring. That is what we do with art. Rhythmic gymnastics is, on the other hand, the strangest of hybrids – an artistic sport.
The women who do it will be back at the next Olympics. Their sport is said by some to go back at least as far as the ancient Olympics, which featured women with hoops, balls, and ribbons, competing with one another in feats of beauty and daring that must have held the ancient Greeks in awe, as they depicted them on ancient vases. Who are the greatest Olympians?
The Hybrid Nature of Rhythmic Gymnastics
Rhythmic gymnastics is not as easy or as common as running, but should we judge Olympians purely on strength and speed, or should other criteria be allowed? Any car or truck can go faster than Usain Bolt and any speedboat can go faster than Michael Phelps.
The robotic quality of pumping the legs and arms in the same motion with incessant repetition seems to celebrate something mind-numbing about the human spirit – that it can turn itself into a machine. In most sports, beauty is at most a by-product.
The Greatest Olympian: Subjectivity in Judging
But in rhythmic gymnastics as well as in ice dancing, as well as in dance itself, beauty matters. I am not very clear on the exact points that you get in rhythmic gymnastics for a beautiful event, but there are several judges, and one of them considers the novelty and the beauty of the routine.
Does each judge look at each gymnast differently, in the way that everyone perceives a Picasso subjectively? It seems so. In car racing, all that matters is that the driver emerges across the finish line faster than the others.
No transportation device is as beautiful as Yana Kudryavtseva twirling a ribbon, or her friend – Margarita Mamun – working with batons! It took them years and years of trial and error to develop their skills.
Human Creativity in Sport
Beauty is not strength, and surprise and inventiveness are not machinic, but instead represent something about the human spirit that AI has not yet mastered because it is not machinic. The original Olympics featured poetry and other arts alongside boxing and the javelin.
We need more sports such as water ballet (synchronized swimming), and competitive forms of dance, but it is also exciting to see taste developed in culinary competitions, and yet there might be many other such sports developed.
Conclusion
Could the application of make-up be considered as a sport? Speed and power are not the only amazing things. Animals and machines can compete with humans and win if speed and power are the only criteria. However, only humans can compete in the arts, and it is here that we see humanity judging and providing critique, as well as endlessly inventing new criteria.
