Tom Brady threw 11 incomplete passes in leading the New England Patriots to a Super Bowl victory. Michael Jordan missed 20 of 35 shots before sinking the title-winning basket for the Bulls in that legendary final game against Utah in 1998. Mark McGwire struck out an average of once every game the year he blasted a record 70 home runs.
In most of the sports Americans are used to watching, failure is a major part of the routine.
But some sports, such as many of those on display in this year’s Olympic games, exact a more severe punishment for mistakes. The slightest deviation from perfection can mean the difference between victory and defeat, between everlasting glory and oblivion.
Ask American ski star Daron Rahlves, whose chance for a medal in the downhill vanished in an instant when he took a turn just a hair too wide rocketing down the mountain. Or ask speed skater Gerard van Velde of the Netherlands, who missed the bronze medal in the 500 meters because he needed 2/100ths of a second longer to complete the course than American Kip Carpenter. Or ask American Jim Shea, whose gold-medal victory margin on two skeleton runs totaled 5/100ths of a second.
These are differences smaller than the human mind can really comprehend–and far smaller than could have once been measured by man-made devices.
But it would be hard to find a discipline more unforgiving than one which uses no clock. In the Thursday night finale of the marquee event, women’s figure skating, 16-year-old Sarah Hughes of the U.S. pulled off the most astonishing upset in the history of the sport. She did it by gliding through her four-minute program without a single visible error.
Three skaters who beat her in the short program fell by the wayside because they fell or stumbled. Four-time world champion Michelle Kwan, who was very nearly perfect four years ago in Nagano but still lost to Tara Lipinski, was a bit short of that standard Thursday. When she landed on the ice midway through her program, she and everyone else knew it might be enough to cost her victory.
It was. Hughes, who came out of the U.S. Nationals last month as only the third-best female skater in America, delivered a performance so flawless and inspired that it clearly surprised even her. “You couldn’t beat that program last night without being perfect,” marveled her coach the next day.
The games were sullied a bit by complaints from Russian and South Korean officials, who thought their athletes were victims of North American bias among judges and referees. But any sport, whether it is decided by the clock or by subjective evaluations, is bound to occasionally produce a controversy. When a country like the U.S. that excels in Olympic sports also hosts the Olympics, it should expect even more disputes than usual.
But more often than not, this installment of the Olympics dramatized that the athletes control their own destinies. These games had their shortcomings, but they also produced some moments that were nothing short of perfect.
