Over 300 events, but only one top spot for each. Think for a moment about how many athletes compete at an Olympic Games. Just making it, and just missing it, is part and parcel of sports. His third-place finish in the same event was not enough to get a plane ticket to Japan. Her Rio teammate, Nathan Adrian, an eight-time Olympic medalist and 2016 team captain, was not so lucky. Her qualification brought tears of relief to the young champion, who crashed and burned just days earlier in the 100-meters, the event that brought her gold in 2016. Simone Manuel, a breakout star of Rio in the pool, had to wait until her last race at the Trials, the quick dash 50-meters, to get her ticket to Tokyo. While gymnastics employs both objective and subjective standards for its selection process – a process that in some years has stopped just short of coaches sending up puffs of smoke to indicate who beyond the top qualifiers makes the team – track and swimming are good old-fashioned races, competitions that remind us how in sports almost anything can happen. With Tokyo 2020 just a few weeks away, Team USA is almost ready, with the Olympic Trials for the marquee sports – track and field, swimming, and gymnastics – creating the last high stakes moments before Opening Ceremony. Why? Because a silver means that gold was likely in reach, a crushing exercise in “what might have been,” what psychologists call “counterfactual thinking,” while a bronze means an athlete has avoided the unthinkable: staying off the podium all together. The study found that bronze medalists tend to be happier and more satisfied with their results than those who take silver. In 1995, a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that focused on the Barcelona Olympics and the Empire State Games, discovered that for some athletes, less can actually be more. “You Lose Gold.” The company pulled the controversial ad campaign soon after, with many crying that it defaced the Olympic spirit, and insulted the overwhelming majority of Olympians who never get close to the victory dais.īut maybe Nike wasn’t so far off in its thinking. I remember stopping in my tracks at the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996 when I first saw the Nike billboard: “You Don’t Win Silver,” it screamed.
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