On Your Marks

It's time. Almost.

Somewhere near the foot of the Eiffel Tower, there’s this big white slab with a digital clock ticking down to July 26th, 2024. By the time you’re done reading this, the first number on that slab will be less than 90. Spin around, and you’ll see posters of the Paris Olympics waving hello from the Avenue Élisée-Reclus.

For the thousands of athletes taking a flight into Paris in July, these three months must feel like a lifetime. It’s like waiting in the alleyway of a massive stage while the host rummages around for the card with your name on it.

This is when the comfort of routine gives way to the anxiety of performance. You’ve spent four years, maybe more, chasing milliseconds, training every tissue in your body to have the optimal strength and weight, and now it’s showtime. Get it right or wait for another 1500 days.

Start of the final heat of the 200 metre run at the 1904 Olympics, St Louis. Source: Missouri History Museum

As an ex-athlete and proud holder of a Class V lemon-spoon race gold medal, I can’t wait for the Olympics. It’s like an all-you-can-eat buffet of sports. And just like with a good spread, I get to sample a bunch of stuff I don’t have in my regular diet. Back in 2010, when the Commonwealth Games came to Delhi, I was first in line for boxing tickets. I couldn’t tell you who’s likely to win the Men’s lightweight gold this year, but you can bet I’ll be glued to the screen when the bell rings. Ditto, cycling.

And whenever I think about the Olympics, I can’t help but picture the greats in their moment of glory. Can you imagine how cool it must have been like to be there, watching a new page of history get written in real time? Muhammed Ali in 1960, Nadia Comăneci in 1976, Abhinav Bindra in 2008, and Michael Phelps for a whole decade.

Phelps is probably my all-time favourite athlete. His peak coincided with a period of my life where I could follow the Olympics with eyes peeled to the screen. In 2012, I had the good fortune of covering the London Olympics for an Indian media outlet. My daily routine was pretty set - get to the office by 3pm (which was around 10am UK time), watch the Olympics all day, write up any interesting bits, and then walk home in the wee hours of the night. Rinse and repeat for two weeks. But, even in a decent-sized newsroom, there are only so many TV screens. And this was before streaming platforms were a thing. So, while I kept tabs on Phelps’ run, I sometimes had to pop over to a nearby cafe and ask the manager to switch to the channel showing his medal events. Some of these finals would kick off at 11:30 pm. Bless Delhi for having a buzzing nightlife.

Usain Bolt was also in his prime during this period. But Bolt, well, he’s a different breed. He’s like a superhero straight out of a comic book. There’s nothing ordinary about him as an athlete. I mean, who else could be so comfortable while leading a race at the Olympics, that they turn sideways in the last 20 metres and cross the finish line while thumping their chest? Bolt competed in 9 events across the 2008, ‘12, and ‘16 Olympics. He bagged 9 golds (he lost one retrospectively in 2017 after multiple Jamaican athletes were found to have taken performance-enhancing drugs). Watching him was a lot of fun, every time, but there was never a doubt about whether he would be the first at the finish line. The excitement was about how fast could he possibly get there.

Phelps, on the other hand, had this strange vulnerability about him. He competed in a bunch of events every time, and entered a lot of them as the favourite. That said, even as he collected gold after gold, it always seemed like a hard-fought victory. There was an element of triumph over serious competition that, looking from afar, seemed missing from Bolt’s gold haul.

A brief summary of his insanity: Phelps started his streak at Athens 2004, where he bagged 6 golds and 2 bronze medals. Four years later, he swept up 8 golds in eight events at Beijing, setting seven world records. I’ll pause and let that sentence wash over you. Done? Okay, let’s move to London. At the 2012 Olympics, he competed in six events, and ended with 4 golds and 2 silvers. 

With 18 golds and 22 career medals, he was, by a long stretch, the most decorated Olympic athlete of all time.

After coming back from London, he gave a bunch of interviews. He was expected to have one foot on the moon, but every time he faced a camera or a mic, he looked like he didn’t want to be there.

“I’m done. I’m finished. I’m retired. I’m done. No more,” Phelps told interviewers after London.

And just like that, at the fresh age of 27, he slipped under the radar, out of the public eye. No news, no appearances on talent shows or WWE pay-per-view events. Just…poof. Gone.

Around 2014, probably spurred on by the slump in the swimming team’s performance since his retirement, Phelps decided to dive back in. It wasn’t about the medals anymore; he just wanted to swim for the love of it, without any pressure to prove anything.

Later that year, just as I was wrapping up at work, a colleague forwarded me an article. Phelps had been arrested for drunk-driving. I read the article, looked at the pictures, and saw someone I barely recognised. The face was all dishevelled, the eyes were puffy. The once sleek, aerodynamic physique that was the subject of so much fascination was nowhere to be seen. Oh, no.

I promise you, I read every article about Phelps and this incident that I could find on the first two pages of Google. Apart from everything else, he was in the middle of - and this is a trigger warning, so proceed with caution - a deep, deep bout of depression.

“I was in a really dark place,” Phelps confessed to Sports Illustrated. “Not wanting to be alive anymore.”

With less than 18 months to go until the 2016 Rio Olympics, it was a long road back to being competitive, never mind harbouring dreams of a medal. He was also suspended from the 2015 World Aquatics Championships for his DUI case. You don’t need the rest of the screenplay from me, so I’ll cut this short: he bagged 6 medals at Rio, 4 of them gold.

Phelps at Rio

There are two feats in sports that I’ll never wrap my head around, and I’ll talk about them for as long as I have functioning vocal cords. Serena Williams winning a Grand Slam while pregnant, without dropping a set, and Michael Phelps clawing his way back from the depths of mental and physical health to snag four Olympic golds.

How much of a Phelps fan am I? Well, in 2017, at a work event where we were asked to present on a recent book we’d read, I showed up with ten slides on Phelps’ autobiography, Beneath The Surface. Sandwiched between presentations on how Google built its search ecosystem and Apple’s approach to design, there I was, waxing lyrical about butterfly strokes and wingspan. I spoke for 30 minutes; I could’ve gone on for 90 more.

Extremely Reddit shitposter at a LinkedIn conference territory.

For reals

And this is where I stop with the spiel and start selling you drugs.

If you are inclined towards books, I would like to share some of my favourites from the shelf called Olympics and Adjacent.

Actually, let’s start with Beneath The Surface itself: I’m not a big fan of autobiographies. Most of the ones I’ve read come off as self-aggrandising exercises. It’s rare to find one that’s got a sense of humour and doesn’t take itself too seriously, like Andrea Pirlo’s I Think Therefore I Play, or one that becomes a window into a person, like Andre Agassi’s Open. Phelps’ book, though, has one of the most relaxed voices I’ve come across in autobiographies. It’s like you’re sitting across from him at a bar, just shooting the breeze. He doesn’t peacock around. He treats his fame like a keepsake, something he picked up along the way, and he’s more eager to share the journey that led him there.

Miracle on Ice: Heading into the 1980 Winter Olympics in the USA, the USSR men’s ice-hockey team was the hot favourite for gold. They’d won five golds in this event in the last six editions. But this isn’t just a story of one team being head and shoulders above the rest. That would be boring. That summer, the USA had led a boycott of the summer Olympics (held in Moscow) in response to the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan. 65 countries backed President Jim Carter and joined the boycott. The Cold War was teetering on the edge of something much darker. Now, can you imagine letting the USSR ice-hockey team waltz off with the gold right in the heart of New York? This is the story of how an underdog team pulled off the impossible.

A Shot At History: The pitch for this book could start and end with the subject and the author: Abhinav Bindra; Rohit Brijnath. Bindra’s story, which began with a chance discovery of the peace and quiet of a shooting range, is a masterclass in the pursuit of excellence. He tells his tale with remarkable candour, calling out the shortcomings in India’s support for Olympic sports and acknowledging his own privileged position with the same tone.

Come for an inspiring story of making the most of every ounce of talent and opportunity; stay for a trip to the mind of one of India’s greatest - and most humble - athletes.

Born to Run: How far can you walk without needing a drink? A few kilometres? Not bad. How far can you run without needing a lie-down? Maybe a marathon at most? Well, there’s a tribe in Mexico, the Tarahumara, who can run for days on end. This is the story of how the author, in his quest for a cure for running-related foot injuries and aches, stumbled upon an article about the Tarahumara and set off for Mexico. What he found was a way of life and an environment unlike anything we know of.

401: I chose this book because Ben Smith isn’t a professional athlete. He had a normal childhood, just like you and me, except for classrooms that sucked all the joy out of his school days. Smith was bullied throughout his childhood and reached a point where he tried to take his own life. He carried that trauma into adulthood, where nothing seemed to bring him any joy. Then he discovered running, and everything changed. The title of the book gives you a hint of the story, but I won’t spoil the rest.

The Sweet Science: Boxing is a brutal sport, but AJ Liebling saw it as two artists at work on a canvas. This book is a collection of Liebling’s essays from his time as a reporter. In 2002, Sports Illustrated named it the best American sports book of all time. It’s a masterclass in writing, of course, but Liebling also challenges the reader to think about this sport in a way nothing else could. He examines and dissects the life of a boxer, the athletic boundaries one has to push to turn their bodies into blocks of stone, and boxing’s place in public consciousness in mid-20th century USA.

This is Your Brain on Sports: Why did so many of us cheer when the Afghanistan men’s cricket team beat England at the World Cup? Why do we get swept up in the euphoria at stadiums? What is it about an athlete or a team that draws us in? Our brains are funny things, and none of these questions have simple answers. L. Jon Wertheim’s book is a bit different because it shifts the focus from the usual suspects - the athletes or the teams - and turns the spotlight on us, the spectators, and our relationship with sports. As you go through the chapters, you’ll realise that the author is exploring our minds, using sports as a mere prism.

Striking Back + Vengeance: Steven Spielberg’s Wikipedia page, especially the filmography section, is a museum by itself. Among the collection of timeless favourites like Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List, there’s one epic that often gets overlooked. In the 2005 movie Munich, Spielberg picked up the story of the Munich Massacre. At the 1972 Munich Olympics, eleven Israeli athletes were killed by the Palestinian militant group Black September. In response, Golda Meir, Israel’s Prime Minister at the time, set up a committee to carry out a covert operation to track down the people behind the attack. The movie is great, and yes, this sentence is going to end with a cliche you can see coming from a mile away, but the books indeed offer so much more.

Full disclosure: both books are written with a thick Israel-got-attacked ink. So, erm, you might find a few sweeping, and inaccurate, generalisations about Palestine.

Enter the Dangal: Wrestling has been one of India’s most successful sports in recent Olympics, bringing home five medals since 2008. And while we marvel at the strength of Sakshi Malik and Vinesh Phogat as they throw their opponents all around the mat and pin them down in scarcely-believable angles, let Rudraneil Sengupta take you on a tour of the villages and akhadas that keep the sport alive in India. And spare a giggle, or a jaw-drop, at what national level wrestlers have to endure in the name of infrastructure.

The Most Incredible Olympic Stories: Picture this - you’re an American Olympic athlete in 1912. You’ve arrived at the Stockholm Olympics as one of the favourites in your event. You breeze through the early rounds. On the day of the quarterfinals, you show up at 9am sharp, only to be told, “Sorry guys, you’re disqualified for being late.” The organisers had apparently told Team USA officials that the quarterfinals of the 100 metre freestyle swimming event would be held the previous evening at 8pm. None of the contestants knew. This is one passage in 173 pages of similar stories. The title sounds grandiose, I know, but the contents of the book more than live up to it. Some of the stuff is wild.