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Team USA Wins the Olympics! That Is How It Works, Right?



By
Dan Levy

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1295364-team-usa-wins-the-olympics-that-is-how-it-works-right


The United States ended the 2012 Olympics with 104 medals, including 46 gold,
leaving London as the clear winner of the Olympics. If the
International Olympic Committee gave out medals for the country with the
most medals, Team USA would have won another gold medal. China
finished second in the medal count with 88 total medals, 38 gold. Great
Britain finished with 65 medals, including 29 gold, giving those in the
host nation the bragging rights of most medals per capita. Still,
no matter how many people live in the respective countries or how many
athletes those countries sent to compete in the Olympics, it is clear
the United States won the 2012 Summer Games. We are the winners at
winning. The best. The greatest. Raise our flag and sing our national
anthem for the 47th time in 16 days, please. We are the champions,
friends. Seriously, that is how it works at the Olympics, right?

For
two weeks every four years, the world exhibits the delicate balance of
celebrating sport through cultural diversity and exuding international
dominance through athletics—then we do it all again in the winter.
Al Bello/Getty Images

Is the United States 104 times more awesome than
Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, all leaving the Olympics with one
bronze medal for each respective country? Is Michael Phelps, who leaves London with six medals, better than the entire nation of Ireland that won only five?

The right answer to both those questions is…probably, yes.

From an Olympic standpoint, the United States is probably 104 times more successful than any country with just one medal, and Michael Phelps probably is a better Olympian than the entire athletic contingent of at least three dozen competing nations.

As
much as we want the Olympics to be about cultural diversity and human
interest around the globe, our nation gravitates toward excellence.
Winning breeds human interest. We frankly don't care as much about our
athletes who didn't medal at the Olympics because there are so many who
did.
Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images

Missy Franklin is one of the biggest breakout stars of
Team USA because she won the most medals of any woman at the Olympics.
Her story becomes instantly more compelling for the average American
talk-show viewer, because Franklin has four gold medals and one bronze
hanging from her neck when she tells it. When Allyson Felix
finished out of the medals in the 100-meter dash, marketing and TV
executives had to feel a slight moment of panic. Three gold medals later
and Felix has the Midas touch for media, guaranteeing herself a long
stay in spotlight. Winning is important. If our American
Olympians didn't win so many medals, as a nation we simply wouldn't care
about watching them compete.
Ronald Martinez/Getty Images

The U.S. women's soccer team had its gold-medal match
put on NBC Sports Network (instead of NBC, which showed the U.S. women's
water polo gold-medal match at the same time), and the redemptive
victory over Japan drew 4.35 million viewers
on a Thursday afternoon. The match was the highest-rated sporting event
in the history of the NBC Sports Network (previously named Versus). The
match wasn't relegated to NBCSN because it couldn't get a number; it
was put on the cable network because it did. More than
four million people watched the women's soccer team earn gold, with
millions more following online and through social media. Just a few days
earlier, nearly six times that many Americans tuned in during
prime-time coverage to watch Gabby Douglas, Aly Raisman and the U.S.
gymnastics team bring home six medals, including gold in the team and
individual all-around competitions. Over 20 million people tuned
in night after night to NBC's tape-delayed prime-time coverage of the
Olympics, just to watch our athletes compete in swimming, gymnastics,
volleyball, track and field and events in more than 30 different
disciplines we immerse ourselves in for two weeks every four years. Why?
Because Americans do well in most of them.
Cameron Spencer/Getty Images

That said, our attention cannot just be because of the
athletic excellence, but more what that excellence represents. Simply
put, we like to watch Old Glory rise to the rafters. Oh, say, can you see…how incredibly awesome we are?

Other
countries have to be sick of the United States winning so many Olympic
medals, but that international athletic dominance could not have come at
a better time for America. Our nation is fractured. We can
barely have a rational discussion with our neighbors—whether it's about
politics, policy, the value of human life and when it begins, or even
innocuous nonsense like the weather—without it turning into a 12-round
bout. Color me naïve, but I do not remember this level of venom
and hatred between sides in pre-Internet election cycles. Blame the
economy or the terrorists or the degradation of human decency and values
(or Al Gore for inventing the Internet, which led to chat rooms and
Facebook and Twitter) or whatever cable channels are stuck between Fox
News and Comedy Central, but it feels like we are living in separate
worlds tied together by nothing more than tax codes, property lines and a
few dozen stars and stripes.
Alex Livesey/Getty Images

For the next two months, every talking head in America
will debate if Paul Ryan will help Mitt Romney systematically save or
destroy this great nation. There is no in-between, or somehow they will
manage to do both. Even our sports interests divide us. People in
Philadelphia hate people in New York who hate people in Boston, just
because of the teams we choose to follow. Shoot, in some parts of the
country, 150 miles separates generations of statewide infighting. In some cities, the side of town you live on can create lifelong enemies. For
two weeks this summer, it did not matter if you were a donkey or an
elephant or a tiger or a horse. (Romney allegedly waited until his
wife's horse competed in the dressage competition in London before
announcing his vice-presidential running mate. The horse did not win.)
Jeff Gross/Getty Images

It did not matter if you were from the north side or
the south, if your socks were red or your pinstripes were blue. The
biggest debates we had as Americans were not about Obamacare or
unemployment or global warming or at what point life begins. The most
heated debate we had during the Olympics was who to root for between
Phelps or Lochte, Douglas or Raisman, Walsh and May-Treanor or Kessy and
Ross. For two weeks, we were towns, cities and states, united by
a team of athletes performing on our behalf, showcasing their strength
and determination as an extension of ours. For two weeks, the
distraction worked. There should be a gold medal for that.