Psychotic Behavior Dims, But Doesn’t Stop The Goodness

His name is Matt Ghaffari and he is a great bear of a man who wrestles for America, loses the gold medal match to a Russian titan, and then on the victory platform begins to cry uncontrollably, his huge body shaking with sobs.

And his father, who fled Iran 19 years ago to come to the USA and make new life possible, hurries to his son and they embrace, and then Matt Ghaffari draws away and with great care removes the silver medal from around his thick neck and places it around his father’s.

“For you, Papa,” he says.

And the father cradles his son’s round face in both his hands and the tears start down his face, and he says: “Oh my boy … my boy … “

I wept at that moment, and the memory of it makes me mist up still.

The best part of the Olympics always has been that it is a therapeutic 2-1/2-week emotional binge that allows us to clean out our tear ducts and fill our hearts.

Just about the time we have given up on humankind, along come the Olympics to replenish our soul and restore our spirit. And so the Olympics always have been The Crying Games.

Today, sadly, they are even more so.

Yet a wonderful thing occurred Saturday, after a bomb exploded in the Centennial Olympic Park downtown. The Games went on anyway. For of all the terrible damage the flying shrapnel and the nails did, the one thing they could not touch was the essence of the human spirit.

So rowers rowed and then bent over their oars in exhaustion. And sprinters ran holes through the wind. And volleyball players hit thunderous spikes and made skittering saves. And not a single athlete asked to be excused, and as the President observed, their courage makes the cowardice of the bombers even more shameful.

And the people kept coming. To stay away is to be held hostage. To stay away is to yield and to encourage the psychotic.

Play on? By all means.

Mourn? Definitely.

Surrender? Never.

It goes to the very soul of the Olympics.

His name is Victor Sinyak and he is a 130-pound weightlifter from Belarus and he is down to his very last chance, and in the corridor he leans against a wall in fatigue and his coach is grabbing him and shaking him, and now he is slapping Sinyak’s cheeks, hard and stinging, and the coach is shouting, the veins popping out, and his tired athlete slowly begins to respond. It is emotional CPR.

And Victor Sinyak rouses himself for one last try, goes out on stage and bends over and grasps the bar and gives it a mighty, mighty tug, and the weight rises slowly … and then it stops. Victor Sinyak has nothing left. The weights crash to the floor and the lifter slumps away, sagging in disgrace. And his coach is waiting for him at the bottom of the steps, his face no longer stern now but soft with compassion, and he is enfolding his athlete in a tender embrace and Victor Sinyak is crying into his coach’s shoulder and the coach is whispering in his athlete’s ear.

“He is telling him,” the interpreter says, “that he loves him.”

When you least expect it, people are capable of stunning deeds.

Yes, these Games have been awash in transportation snafu. Yes, they are tacky. Yes they are unpardonably commercial. But all the good stuff, ah, that is still here. The stuff that matters. The best part of the Games are, well, the games. And the people who play them.

Who play with valor and resiliency, who play in pain and through exhaustion, who play with grit that never fails to astound you, and then cry in defeat and cry in triumph and cry leaning against one another, and in the process set the rest of us to weeping, too.

I am of Irish heritage and accordingly I cry over sunsets and I confess that the highlight of my Olympics occurred when a 2-year-old voice told me over the phone from 800 miles away: “Wuv ooo, Pop-Pop.”

It turned me into a puddle. So I am easy meat for television, which manipulates our emotions so cleverly, so shamelessly, anyway.

We will not be intimidated, the President said Saturday. And so the people came. They looked determined, not cowed. If anything, their spirit for the Olympics seemed heightened.

It is possible at any venue to look up from live competition and see a series of television screens on which Dominique Moceanu, 72-pound gymnast, flies about like Tinkerbell, and next to her a 300-pound wrestler, Alexander Karelin, is grappling with a man the approximate size of a condo.

We yearn for heroes. So an 80-pound child-woman named Kerri Strug scurries down the runway on a leg aflame with pain and sticks a vault and wins the first gold medal in the history of American women’s gymnastics and then must be carried to the victory platform … well, even Machiavellian TV couldn’t conjure up such theater.

And when an American pair just misses qualifying for the finals in rowing and one of them crosses the finish line unconscious, having literally given his all, then Adam Holland says of his mate, Mike Peterson, the most lyrical thing I have heard one athlete say of another: “Someone gave me everything he had today and more, and if I’m ever lacking in inspiration I’ll look back at this race and realize that someone gave me the ultimate gift.”

In the name of such unquenchable spirit as that, the Olympics go on.