This week, per usual, I’ve been watching sports I see only during the Olympics: fencing, badminton, table tennis, water polo.
Then I go to the gym, where an extremely fit woman visiting from Colombia has been putting herself through a rigorous routine: weights, treadmill, jump-rope, repeat. The other day I asked her if she was an athlete back home.
“Yes,” she said. “I play water polo.”
It was a bit like learning a new word and then almost immediately coming across it in a sentence.
Of the four channels I get that are showing the Olympics, my favorite is the Olympic Channel. It is the only one showing the tennis, but I also enjoy its news segments, which often feature interviews with medal winners who are not American. Some have translators, but many speak in English, sometimes through tears over not finishing first. There’s an emotional honesty to the exchanges that is often as riveting as the competitions.
My Opening Ceremonies gold medal goes to the South Koreans and the Belgians for their Rooster ties.
Watching Novak Djokovic win Wimbledon on Sunday I thought of the Serbian waiter who served us on Las Olas a few weeks back. Hania had asked him about the situation in Serbia and he had launched into a tirade against president Aleksandar Vucic and his megalomania.
“After the French Open,” the waiter said, “the headline in the newspaper was not: ‘Djokovic Wins the French Open,’ it was ‘Vucic Congratulates Djokovic on Winning the French Open.’”
There is a wonderful appropriateness, not to mention symmetry, in tennis's great trinity - Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic - all having 20 Grand Slam titles. Now if only it could stay like that.