Are you really excited about climbing in the Olympics?

It was opening night for the Olympics and the mood in our house was festive. My wife, Jen, was full of a kind giddy energy reminiscent of Christmas morning. She is a former gymnast and grew up watching the likes of Kerri Strug and both of the Dominiques—Dawes and Moceanu, of course. She loves the Olympics. Our daughters are too young to have seen a summer Games before, but they were thrilled by what was currently taking place: eat dinner and watch TV? Fuck yeah! Our friends also came over to watch the opening ceremony and hopefully catch a glimpse of our climbing heroes strutting into the arena to represent our tribe on the world stage. Like I said, the mood was festive because climbing was finally and officially in the Olympics.

As Millennials, albeit older Millennials, there are some things we are obliged by dint of our generational class not to own—namely IRAs and a subscription to cable television. Watching something like the Olympics, or any major sporting event, is more complicated than simply clicking on channel 4. We spent some time navigating the maze of downloading the Peacock app, setting up an account with the one fake email address we use for this kind of bullshit, confirming that account on the laptop, scanning the QR code with our phone and double logging-in through the app on the phone, which was also now synced with the TV, and then, finally, sitting and staring at the spinning ball on the screen for five minutes while the “live” broadcast loaded.

As we know, the IOC included climbing, skateboarding, and surfing in the Olympics this year to attract a younger generation—but did they realize that few folks under the age of 40 have managed their avocado toast addictions well enough to be able to afford a home in which to place a TV with a premium Comcast subscription? I digress …

The ceremony began and it was surreal to see these well-choreographed performances taking place in an empty auditorium, a conspicuous reminder of COVID’s fourth-wave spread. You could hear the protesters chanting outside the arena—83% of Japanese people, according to one poll, oppose the Olympics taking place amid this public health crisis. The whole thing was an instant metaphor for the polished sheen of celebration that the Olympics try to represent, and the dark underbelly that underpins it all.

Nevertheless, the mood in the Bisharat house remained, on balance, energized. Now it was time for the Parade of Nations! And, oh boy, here they come! Only they’re all in masks so we can’t see their faces. … Hm. That’s a bummer. Oh, here’s the Czech Republic! Where’s Ondra, though? Surely we couldn’t miss that distinctive mop of hair. Say, when is the United States up? Not till the end? By the way, how many countries are there? This is really … boring.

The Parade of Nations was a parade of dissuasion. “This is so lame,” Jen finally admitted. We turned the TV off and put the girls to bed. We didn’t even make it to the United States.

The Olympics is a funny thing because four years is just long enough to make you forget that you also hated Parade of Nations last time you tried to watch it. Those four years make it just difficult enough for anyone to really care about fixing any of the seemingly intractable problems that beset the Olympics—from the blind eyes we turn toward countries’ human rights abuses, to bidding scandals, corruption and cheating, environmental issues, and the obscene burden placed on host cities. All we remember are the great moments. When the Games goes to Beijing in 2022, we’ll pretend we don’t know anything about the crackdown in Hong Kong or the Uyghurs genocide, because in our hearts, the Olympics means Kerri Strug doing a one-legged vault.

“The Olympics thrive on short attention spans,” writes John Branch in his withering report on this very topic. “Outcry over scandals usually ends the moment the show begins.”

Yep, we’re all just goldfish waiting for the next shiny object to appear in our bowls.

Well, the show has begun, yet I continue to find myself struggling to be very excited about it. In 2016, I wrote a rather snarky essay called “Climbers Don’t Need the Olympics.” I will admit to becoming somewhat more optimistic and positive about climbing in the Olympics in general as compared to back then. One thing I may have gotten wrong, for instance, is that all the nuance about what makes climbing great, hard, and dynamic would be lost—and yet The New York Times put together this amazing digital feature on Adam Ondra, and the Washington Post created a somewhat gimmicky but also kinda cool AR feature showing Brooke Rabbatou speed climbing.

Yet I also can’t ignore the decidedly pessimistic mood this year toward the Olympics, swirling like an ink blot in the cultural ether. Recall how American TV producers had decided on their Olympics mono-narrative on Sha’Carri Richardson. With her good looks and shock of orange hair, she promised to be this summer’s “That Girl” a likely Gold Medalist in the 100m. She would be the thing that would make us all feel good, the thing that would make us forget about all the things that are bad, the thing that we would remember in our hearts four years from now when deciding to turn on the next Parade of Nations opening ceremony.

Then she flunked a drug test and it all crumbled. It seems like every one of these mono-narratives that the media rallies around succumbs to some cynical force. The vampire squid of our culture war has its tentacles sucking the soul out of every aspect of our lives, including the Olympics discourse.

The US won no medals on day 1, which was supposedly an unthinkable outcome since many Americans still presume that we are the best at everything. I’ve read people smarter than me make the case that COVID is the thing that finally put a nail in our false premise of American exceptionalism. We got owned and humbled by the pandemic—and it feels like it’s all crumbling. So much culture war seems to be an implicit fight over the stake of this ground truth, of whether we are a great nation or just another average “shithole country.”

Now our other It Girl, Simone Biles, easily the greatest gymnast ever, pulled out for mental health reasons. The pressure was just too much. Predictably, she’s already receiving criticism for her decision by the usual right-wing assholes who seem to be literally rooting for the U.S. to fail.

I wonder if it’s even possible in this dark cultural moment to experience the kind of genuine and utterly sincere awe, wonder, and excitement that the Olympics promise—or whether that promise was all along just a figment rendered by nostalgic self-deception. Are things just really more depressing now, or has the world always been on the verge of ending?

I remain optimistic about climbing debuting in the Olympics next week on August 3. I want it to become the thing—the It Sport—that breaks through the pessimistic fascia choking our culture, the thing that instills a small taste of genuine awe and wonder in humanity no matter who you are. I want climbing to become the thing I already know it is. A cross-culture celebration of human potential, and a meeting of shared stoke.

All around me, the climbing industry and media are tripping over themselves on the off-chance that this narrative will break through in the Olympics. They’re rallying around their mono-narrative that the Olympics is the thing that finally “legitimizes our sport.”

I dunno. Our sport was already pretty legit. And I worry that climbers face a future in which they have to worry about failing drug tests, molesting coaches, pressures to dope, or the specter of public scorn all because they drop out at the last minute because the fucking pressure is just too great and climbing’s just no fun anymore.

But I also know that, like most people, I’m a goldfish. And I’ll forget about all of it if it’s a good show. Let the games begin.


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About The Author

Andrew Bisharat

Andrew Bisharat is a writer and climber based in western Colorado. He is the publisher of Evening Sends and the co-host of The RunOut podcast.

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