JORDYN

News of the Jordyn Wieber drama did not reach me in London until this morning. The BBC’s coverage yesterday was all about the women’s road race, a soaked eighty-seven mile affair that ended in a mad sprint up the Mall, with the Yorkshirewoman Lizzie Armitstead winning silver. Besides that, I watched some judo. Have you seen judo? It is terrifying. Fortunately, the sight of profoundly conditioned men and women poking at each other, like bears with sticks, was offset by some great vocabulary words, including yuko (felling your competitor on his side), wazari (felling your competitor nearly flat on his back), and golden score (judo’s version of sudden death, in which the match goes to the first person to score a takedown). This morning, we dabbled in rowing (in which heat competition is called repechage) and the cross-country portion of the equestrian eventing contest, which was so gorgeous that I wanted to pause the television and keep the image—oiled steeds slinking through fluorescent green countryside—on the wall like a Hockney.

as a longtime quadrennial gymnastics enthusiast who still can’t hear “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” without thinking of Dominique Moceanu and has yet to encounter a more convincing baddie than Svetlana Boginskaya. I went to the BBC Web page, I tried the British papers: nothing. Following the Olympics in a country other than the one of your birth—and formative Olympics-watching—is a disconcerting experience. Notions of cosmopolitanism wither. Who cares if the British table-tennis champion Paul Drinkhall was bumped from the tournament by Germany’s Dimitrij Ovtcharov? Or if “GB lightweight sculls pair dominate heat”? (Admittedly, the Nigerien Hamadou Djibo Issaka, who took up the sport three months ago, adds some interest to the rowing competition.) It’s the Olympics. I thought, give me “Bugler’s Dream,” give me Bart Connor, give me—if you must—Bob Costas, give me gold medals! Sprinkle pathos around like gym chalk. The rituals of the Olympics, inscribed on the psyche of a country, are as unaccountable and sacrosanct as how a family does its Christmas.
But the uproar over Wieber’s misfortune, even if it’s the American way, seems wrong. Likeable and talented as Wieber is, her teammates Aly Raisman and Gabby Douglas, this one night, at least, received higher scores. One can make the argument, as Josh Alper has, that the rule that bars more than two members of each national team from qualifying for the final is unfair, especially for deep squads like the Americans, but the rule is the rule. So Wieber’s elimination wasn’t a “travesty,” as Béla Károlyi called it, or an “injustice,” as her coach John Geddert complained; it was the Olympics. Karolyi sounded especially cynical in his assertion, to Al Michaels, that Wieber had been the victim of a “lineup mistake,” the implication being Wieber, who performed before Raisman, would have been a more deserving beneficiary of the judges’ presumed tendency to reserve their highest scores for last. Károlyi’s comments were a reminder that sports are as rife with horse trading as politics. He sounded like a party grandee trying to game the results of a primary. Why did Raisman deserve to be sacrificed any more than Wieber? You feel for Wieber. You wish she’d made it, for her sake, and for that of everyone who would have delighted in watching her. But Károlyi and Geddert bemoaned Wieber’s fate at the expense of respecting the accomplishments of her teammates, whose interests they are also supposed to represent.
Anyway, you want pathos? Tonight, the South Korean fencer Lam Shin staged a seventy-minute sit-in after losing, in a controversial judgment, the semi-final of the women’s epee contest.