Now we can all sit down and breathe out, after the hurrahs and flag-waving and tears and chest-puffing. All the screaming hyperbole and legendary statistics can finally be put back into the Aussie rules box and left to the weekend scarf tribes.
For a while back there, we forgot the cloak of misery and terror that half the world lives under. Even the daily grind of living in the mortgaged world was bearable as we cheered on the godlike feats of ordinary mortals at the Paris Olympic Games.
Now, the daily news cycle can return to its gruel of calamity and crime, sprinkled with the pepper of voyeurism.
For someone with different vices to the addictions of gambling and sport, the Olympic Games provided fascinating insights into small corners of human activity not usually shared on prime-time television or the siloed social media feeds of older white people.
For instance, I never understood or cared much about skateboarding until I watched those teenagers fly through the bright summer air at the Place de la Concorde. They all looked so ridiculously happy and relaxed. Even when they lost a take-off or fluffed a landing, they just picked up their board, waved and sauntered off with a raised eyebrow and an “Oh well, stuff happens” shrug. Cool.
If someone crashed out, they got a comforting pat on the back or even a high-five from a fellow competitor. This was a community of admirers and supporters with shared tribal values.
When 14-year-old Australian Arisa Trew won gold and became the youngest ever gold medallist, her bright, self-effacing smile felt like the future of the human race was going to be okay, whatever Donald Trump and climate change might bring.
As always, the games also spotlighted the flaws and contradictions of the human condition. Gender arguments and the narrow dividing line between sport and art pulled focus from achievements in the main events when Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and Aussie breakdancer Rachael Gunn entered the ring for their respective sports.
Khelif rose above a tsunami of online hate to win gold on her own terms, while ‘Raygun’ showed that even the Olympics couldn’t crystallise the blurred lines between creativity and results-based performance.
Is breakdancing an art, or is it a sport? Many breakers believe breakdancing is more than just a dance — it’s a counterculture and has no business being an Olympic event.
Breakdancing began on the streets of the Bronx in the late 1970s as groups of young African Americans and Latinos gathered to express their identity through attitude, fashion, music and dance.
How that can be codified into the parameters of an Olympic sport, I don’t know. But lobbyists from the World DanceSport Federation clearly thought it was possible.
Raygun, who is a university lecturer specialising in the cultural politics of breakdancing, earned the praise of our prime minister for “having a go” and the derision of many in the breakdancing community for her zero-point-scoring “unusual” moves.
Nevertheless, Professor Raygun became a global meme and earned Olympic glory anyway. She foreshadowed the epic song of the closing ceremony with perfect precision — she did it her way.
Now, if that isn’t perfecting the art of sports performance, I don’t know what it is.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.
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