The epitaph of the Paris Olympics will be long and contain an encyclopedia of information. Like how many chocolate muffins were eaten. Or how many people were asked to leave the Olympic Village for disruptive behavior – which is only one I know of. Or how many people went to a doctor after jumping in the Seine. But one of, if not the most prominent fact will be who won the medal count, the war with the peaceful co-existence of the Olympic movement.
There’s two ways to measure that. One is just who won the most overall, gold, silver, and bronze combined. And that, by far, was the US, with 126 total. The other way is who got the most gold medals, if you’re someone who considers second place the first loser – and for the record, I’m not. By that metric, there’s actually a tie between America and China, it’s arch rival Olympic and otherwise. They both won 40, both double third place Japan. The US and China pull from different sports to get there. The US takes a lot from track and swimming, while China dominates diving and ping pong. There were some surprises here and there, but for the most part, both parties played the hits.
Of course, in any contest this close, you can’t help but ask what if. What if we’d taken just one more gold medal, ran one step faster, hit one more shot. That’s the eternal question anytime you come up short, even if a tie for first is no great defeat. There’s some obvious ones for the US. Like what if Noah Lyles hadn’t gotten sick before the 200. Or what if we had put a faster anchor leg in the mixed 4x4 relay. And those are just in track. And while China can play the same game, it’s much easier for the US given its 86 silver and bronze awards.
But there is no place better to ask the question than for the men’s high jump, where the US may literally have grasped silver from the jaws of gold. After the two remaining jumpers both missed all three jumps at 2.36 meters, American Shelby McEwen and New Zealand's Hamish Kerr had a decision to make. Either share the gold and the $50,000 prize fund, or jump it off for a winner takes all. They took the later, unlike what happened in Tokyo three years ago, and they jumped until one of them made a height the other didn’t. That ended up being Kerr, who took gold all to himself, which left McEwen with silver, an outstanding accomplishment that may have felt better if you didn’t already have gold basically hanging around your neck. It felt a bit like turning down a speed boat on Let’s Make a Deal because you wanted a sports car but ended up with new kitchen appliance. Sure, a new range is great, but you can’t ski off it.
There’s been a whole lot of Monday morning high jumping, especially from the American audience. A lot have criticized McEwen for not pushing for a tie, especially since Kerr had gotten the better of him recently. And let’s be honest, no matter how you got it, a gold medal is a gold medal, especially in an individual event. And honestly at the time, I thought it was a bad move myself, perhaps a signifier of the hubris of the elite athletic complex.
But as days passed, I’ve softened my position. And maybe McEwen’s line about being happy with his decision is more authentic than I gave him credit for. In the end, elite athletes like Shelby McEwen and Hamish Kerr don’t get where they are by dreaming about a medal, even if that’s how it appears. They get there by dreaming about being the best in the world, for which you get that medal. To stop that pursuit in the final moments just because event officials give you an out just isn’t part of that DNA. So even if we’d think the smart decision is to take the gold and declare victory, I don’t think that’s the win either of them are looking for. And the what if question they’d ask years from now is whether they could have won. That’s probably a much tougher quandary to live with than wondering what a gold medal might look like on the mantle, as odd as that may sound.
That said, it still might have been nice if Shelby McEwen had taken gold. Because for the US Olympic Team, that tie would have been enough to win.
Keith Strudler is the director of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler
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