The Olympics has started, and I can’t be happier about it. The delay of the Games last summer due to COVID was one big bummer, along with the cancellation of high school spring sports, which meant my nephew missed his senior baseball season. It also resulted in no Women’s College World Series, and I’ve got a softball-loving daughter who lives to watch some double plays.

Not so this year. It’s a weird time warp, seeing “Tokyo 2020” emblazoned along the sides of the swimming pools and gymnastics arena, and I sure don’t want to go back to 2020. But seeing it also makes me feel like we picked up right where we left off, and there’s comfort in feeling that the cycle has started again. And even better this time, for we can watch the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing in just a few short months, and then it’s only two years until the Summer Games roll around again, this time in Paris.

My love for the Games started in 1984 when the United States played host to the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. From the opening ceremony, to watching the events, I absorbed it all.

It was in America! Go Team USA!

The theme song was a lush melody with intermittent staccato fanfares of trumpets and which our high school band played in their marching show the following year. Ever since it has been the soundtrack in my mind for all heroic athletic pursuits, and I can’t help but think it is why I chose the trumpet during the beginning band even though I am pretty sure my director really wanted me to play the flute.

I also loved seeing all the athletes proud to compete for their own countries and represented by an array of colorful flags. It was so many different sports, much more interesting than the boring football games my dad watched on Saturdays in the fall. I feel differently about football now, but I’m never going to turn down watching gymnastics, swimming, or diving.

I also knew then, and it is still true today, that I could barely turn a cartwheel in the yard, that my little town didn’t have a pool, and that my folks wouldn’t agree to my leaping head first off high places.

I looked for a hero among the athletes and a sport that I could do. I would have liked to be Mary Lou Retton, scoring a perfect 10 to the applause of the entire world, except for maybe that of the Communist countries. The USSR and most other Communist-bloc countries did not compete in the 1984 Olympics, their boycotting the game a retaliation of the United States doing the same four years earlier when Moscow had hosted the Games. The news at the time was thick with commentary, and even though I was a kid, I had a father who watched the world news and encouraged me to listen.

So I listened, and I became deathly afraid of a nuclear missile hitting the United States and blowing us all to oblivion. I was so captivated with the idea that I wrote a story in the second grade for which I won an award. The Googles, an alien society and loose representation of the United States, defeated the Russians by pelting them with asteroids collected from the belt between Mars and Jupiter.

(Oh yeah. Good stuff. I had also heard of Star Wars and knew we were not defenseless. Not the movie. Reagan’s program. Look it up.)

So any win for the USA was a win against Communism. Any time the red, white, and blue took the gold was a win for freedom.

And still I looked for a hero.

I found one in Mary Decker. She was a distance runner. Looked to me like all you really needed to be a distance runner was to keep working and not give up. I could do that. I watched Mary Decker run in clips of previous races and just knew she would win the gold. All the commentators said that this was going to be her year.

But she fell, stumbling in a jumble of feet and legs, the blame landing squarely on the barefoot Zola Budd who had cut in front of Decker. “Get up!” I wanted to yell at her. “Get back in it! Catch up! You can do it!” But she just sat there and sobbed, and I couldn’t understand why it had happened like that.

She had fallen, and she did not get up. She was carried off the track by her boyfriend.

Everyone blamed Budd, the barefoot girl, but even Decker, in the years that followed, said that the ultimate reason for her fall was that she was inexperienced in running with a pack.

I guess we could also say that it was just not her day.

I wish the same could be said of me and my running career, during which time I netted a county track meet win in the mile and second place in the two-mile in the ninth grade, the year we were all required to take PE in high school and our coach made us run every day. I also qualified for state in the two-mile, and if I had kept training the same way, I might have placed at the state meet.

But for whatever reason, the PE class stopped running in May, so I didn’t do well not because it just wasn’t my day, but because I had gotten lazy and stopped training. I could have done it on my own, but oh well.

So, the point of all this…well, I guess we can say this is about more than just going for the gold.

Watch the Olympics. There are athletes who have had to spend a year waiting for the moment, continuing to train, hoping that nothing prevents them from being in the hunt for the gold.

Let your kids watch the Olympics. Let them be inspired. Talk to them about what they see and hear. Help them pick up a new sport if they are interested and it is within your resources to make it a reality.

Or maybe even a new instrument. Those trumpet fanfares still signal commercial breaks.

Choose a news source and let your kids watch it and you watch it with them. Don’t stick your head in the sand. It’s a rough and nasty world, and people need to stay aware of what is going on. Our kids need to learn to be aware of what is going on.

Some of them might be inspired to write stories about it all.

Don’t be lazy, and don’t give up.

And the last lesson, maybe the most important one of all:

Don’t run in a pack.