Monday Motivation: Flawed champions
This brings us to up to the three hundred and sixty-fifth of my Monday Morning essays – and the last of the reprises I’ve allowed myself. It was written in July, 2012 which seems like more than an age ago. From next week, I’ll be whipping out more contemporary musings.
We watched the extraordinary closing ceremony of the Paralympics last night – and I was struck by a thought about the stories that rattle about us in every possible direction.
This was my thought: Every athlete in the Olympics, obviously, has a story to tell – of promise, opportunities taken, hard work, victory, defeat and triumph. Every athlete’s on a hero’s journey. Every race, every contest, is a hero’s journey.
This is all a given, a pedestrian truth of competitive athletics.
But the paralympians, these flawed champions, are in another category entirely…
An image springs to mind of a young woman, hair bound tightly beneath a scarf, clearly suffering from very severe cerebral palsy, in a wheelchair with a shot in her hand, preparing to heave it. Her head weaves from side to side, in the coils of the cerebral accident that has her in its thrall. But her eyes are bright and focused with ambition, and, for a second, the cerebral palsy relaxes its hold on her and her arm shoots forward, the shot describes a neat parabola and lands on the turf just a few metres from her.
And I think: who is this woman, what is her story, how can one explain that burning ambition in a body so broken by circumstance?
And, however meager the outcome, how sweet, how deep the sense of accomplishment!
Another image: the South African Fanie van der Merwe, who snatched gold in the final centimetres of his 100-metre race when he threw himself at the tape with such disregard, with such recklessness that he stumbled and fell immediately after he’d breached it. But the gold was safely in his grasp, the dream he’d dreamt now a reality.
It was the richness of their stories that for me made the Paralympics the more rewarding spectacle.
And it reminded me, if I needed reminding, that the world is, in fact, no more than a vast warehouse stuffed full of stories.
And it’s our task, and our duty, and our glory to tell them.
Happy writing.
Richard
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