The fundamental question
COPENHAGEN — For a world too often resentful in recent years of American arrogance, of American boastfulness, of self-styled American superiority, here were some two dozen U.S. Olympic and Paralympic athletes carrying a message of humility and engagement, tolerance and respect.
This was no act.
This was genuine — a reflection of the powerful role that sport has played in shaping their lives and of the import of the Olympic and Paralympic movements in animating the dreams that many of them saw through to gold, silver and bronze.
“I always say that sport changed my life,” Bryan Clay, the 2008 Beijing decathlon champion, said. “It put me on a path that made me a better person.”
“Sport brings people together like nothing I have ever seen,” said David Robinson, the basketball Hall of Famer. “There are no political barriers, no cultural barriers. Nothing.”
Linda Mastandrea, a multiple gold medalist in Paralympic track and field, cried as she talked about how, at age 19, she had been introduced to the idea that despite her disability she could still take part in sports. She called it “the power of possibility.”
She said after wiping away her tears, “I had no idea I was going to get this emotional today. What this movement offers is such power and possibility — for people to learn about themselves, about who they are and what they can do. That’s what it offers Olympians and Paralympians — to test our limits, to learn about boundaries we thought we could never get beyond.”
In its way, this scene underscored the fundamental issue at stake Friday when the International Olympic Committee votes for its 2016 site, choosing Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, Madrid or Tokyo.
The United States of America is reaching out to the world.
Is the rest of the world ready to reach back?
Jerry Colangelo, the Phoenix Suns executive who as managing director of USA Basketball’s men’s senior team orchestrated the “Redeem Team” success in Beijing in 2008, said here Thursday that the very first thing he told his collection of star players was that Americans particularly needed to show respect to others and to “be humble about our chore, to go out and do the very best we could.”
He said, “Chicago’s plan — Chicago on merit deserves great consideration. But so do the other cities. And that’s why I say we must be humble. We must show respect.”
Yes, Rio offers the IOC the chance to take the Games to South America for the first time.
“The fact of the matter,” Brazil’s President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, asserted in typically unabashed style at a news conference here Thursday, “is that no one has presented a project of the magnitude that we presented, with the quality that we presented.”
“Some say, ‘Well, Brazil maybe could have presented a smaller, more shy project, not an expensive project,’” the Brazilian proposal including $11.1 in capital improvements in and around Rio. “This is for those that don’t believe in doing things. We want to overcome and show the world that, yes, we can — we can do it.”
That of course is a riff ripped from President Obama, and while it would indeed be a first to go to South America, this vote is not nearly so much about that as it is a referendum on American rapprochement with the world after the Bush years.
The IOC stands poised as the first international body to figuratively accept Obama’s outreached hand.
“I believe we have an historic opportunity to do great things together,” President Obama wrote several IOC members in a Sept. 10 letter, days before he addressed the United Nations and spoke, in a distinct shift from what he called the “almost reflexive anti-Americanism” of the prior eight years, “of “the hope that real change is possible, and the hope that America will be a leader in bringing about such change.”
Not the leader.
A leader.
The president is due to arrive into Copenhagen early Friday morning. He and Michelle Obama are due together to take part in the Chicago presentation to the IOC. The vote takes place shortly after 5 p.m. local time; IOC president Jacques Rogge will make the announcement of the winner at 6:55 in the evening, give or take a minute.
“It’s something very big. It’s huge,” Nicole Hoevertsz of the Carribean nation of Aruba, an IOC member since 2006, said Wednesday when asked what it meant to have Michelle and Barack Obama on scene.
Hoevertsz emphasized that she had appointments here not only with the First Lady but with Lula and with Spain’s royal family. She stressed that she not made up her mind about who ultimately gets her vote. At the same time, she said, referring to President Obama and the First Lady, “They are people who make a difference in the world.”
The First Lady has been meeting since Wednesday afternoon with IOC members in a fourth-floor hotel room at the Marriott, the IOC’s base in Copenhagen.
Those who have been in have said she is magnetic.
Because of Barack and Michelle Obama, gymnastics champion Bart Conner said, everyone on the Chicago team “got a little extra pep in our step.”
The buzz in the hotel lobby below is that Chicago’s campaign has steadily been building momentum.
The buzz is also that Tokyo goes out in the first round. From there no one is ready to risk a reliable prediction.
The second round could prove particularly woolly, the dynamics of the race further complicated by a tiff that erupted here between Rio and Madrid, a Spanish Olympic official criticizing the Rio effort, the Rio team then formally complaining to the IOC.
In a race that may turn on just one or two votes, the presentations Friday are apt to prove pivotal. Conner, who was in on rehearsals here earlier this week, called the Chicago presentation “powerful, clear, compelling and consistent.”
The live version, of course, to include Obama himself.
And the Obama message — as the president said Sept. 16 on the South Lawn of the White House at a rally promoting the Chicago effort, “The United States is eager to welcome the world to our shores.”
“This is not about Chicago,” David Robinson echoed Thursday. “It’s not about the United States.
“It’s about the honor of hosting the world. It’s about giving a platform for every athlete and every story to be told. I think we can do that.”