The Extra Mile

An author I very much admire complained on Facebook recently that the Olympics are an example of "scarcity economics" – only one gold medal so we don't celebrate everyone's immense talent. The Games – all manner of sports contests, she said – are closely bound up in interpersonal violence and war – too loud, too raucous, too hierarchical, and as such anti-feminist. Competition, she argued, is not as important as cooperation, and we're culturally misguided to invest so much in the former. So she's not watching the Olympics.

OK. Whatever. And she's not wrong. But she's not right either.

She added that the results of the men's 100 meter race were meaningless as everyone basically arrived at the finish line in a pack. And while her whole post pissed me off – perhaps, I confess, because I am feeling a tad guilty for spending so much time these past few weeks glued to the Peacock app – in this case, she is dead wrong.

She's wrong that it's meaningless – as a number or as an achievement. Lyles won by five-thousandths of a second, a difference that is imperceptible to the human eye but not imperceptible. Not even insignificant. At the speeds that Olympians race (very fast), particularly over this short distance (very short), one can't really expect there to be a massive difference in completion times: .12 seconds differentiated first and last place in Paris; .18 seconds in Tokyo; .25 seconds in Rio. You simply aren't going to see a Super Bowl XXIV blowout (Broncos fans know) in a Track and Field event at the Olympics.

You might not think that being called "the fastest man in the world" matters all that much. You might not think that the 100 meter race run once every four years is the best way to award this title. But meaningless? Yeah, no.

(It's a strange argument from an author who's made the case for the radical importance of "hope." I'm not sure you can separate hope from sports – for spectators or for athletes.)

Listen, I do understand criticism of the Olympics – I skipped watching "the spectacle" of the Opening and Closing Ceremonies because these are a consistent reminder of how gross these big sporting events can be – the nationalism, the corporate sponsorships, the expense. And no doubt, the whole history of the Games is fraught, to say the least.

It’s fine if you don’t like sports. It’s fine if you don’t watch sports. But I always make a scrunched up, "are you sure you want to go there?" face when I hear people denigrate the athletes and dismiss their achievements. Doing so is so often bound up in elitism and racism – one that implies that "a life of the mind" is better than "working with one's hands," let alone with one's whole body. Certainly, we can question the resources that go into certain sports and certain sporting events, but I don't think we can say that "non-fiction writer" – just to pick a not-so-random example – is a more impressive or important career, or that that job makes you a better, more moral person.

(Side-note: the NCAA issued a press release last week that over 1200 athletes at the Games – so, over 10% – were current, past, or incoming NCAA student-athletes. Only 385 of those were Americans. The influence of US higher education – on the field, in and beyond the classroom – should not be underestimated.)

I've been wondering how much of the zeitgeist in the US right now – the good vibes surrounding Kamala Harris and Tim Walz – is piggybacking on the success of the Olympics – not just in some jingoistic medal count or in "our team" winning at basketball and soccer, but in the success of all the Olympians. "Is This the Blackest Summer Olympics Ever?" asks Liz Courquet-Lesaulnier. We can see in the athletes – and not just the American athletes – Black joy. Radical Black joy. (We see in Snoop Dogg and Flavor Flav Black joy.) We can see Black excellence.

This matters.

I don't believe that the achievements of those who participated in the 100 meter race or the 800 meter race or the women's 400 meter hurdles or men's 4x400 meter relay or women's gymnastics or women's 1500 meter freestyle or women's fencing or women's wrestling or women's boxing were meaningless – not for the sport, not for the broader culture. Far far far far far far far far from it.

“Hope just means another world might be possible, not promise, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.” – Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

I've heard a lot of talk, particularly in running circles, that it's "the technology" that has made athletes faster – shoe technology in particular. And yes certainly the shoes worn today – carbon-plated shoes, spikes, and so on – are highly engineered tools explicitly designed to that end. But to credit, say, Nike for the increase in speed is to reify capitalist enterprise and innovation, and more importantly, to erase the accomplishments and agency of the people wearing them. There are a lot of reasons why we've gotten faster and stronger – shoes, sure, but you can also point to advances in other technologies too. Advances in nutrition and coaching. Advances in sports science. Advances in sleep science.

But we've also gotten faster and stronger because we believe we can get faster and stronger. For a long long time, no one thought it possible to run under a 4-minute mile. Once Roger Bannister first did so in 1954, a number of other men did so in quick succession – not because anything had changed in terms of physiology or technology, but because of the knowledge that such a thing was possible. (Cole Hocker set an Olympic record in Paris, running the 1500 meter race in 3:27:65; Faith Kipygeon set the women's Olympic record by running 3:51:29. 9 of the 12 women in that race ran it under 4 minutes.) We will see someone run a sub-2 hour marathon – another feat that was once deemed impossible – in competition very soon. Not because of the shoes – not entirely because of the shoes, at least – but because Eliud Kipchoge has demonstrated that that time barrier can be broken. (Kipchoge had his first ever DNF in Sunday's race, and it seems likely he'll now retire from the sport – still the GOAT.)

The Olympics are a celebration of the human body. We hear that all the time – what a cliche, I know. (And one that the upcoming Paralympics challenges and subverts in powerful, beautiful ways.) But the Olympics should be a celebration too of the human brain (which last time I checked is part of the body, sorry Descartes).

To succeed in sports – any sport – requires more than brawn or speed; it requires intellect: strategies, tactics, your own playbook as well as others. It requires knowing the sport, knowing your body. It requires great willpower – showing up consistency, pushing through pain.

We split the body and the mind – and crucially, split labor into "intellectual" and "manual" – and told ourselves we could automate the latter in the factory. Now we're building tools that purport to automate the former too, never recognizing that all labor is thinking labor and all labor is embodied labor. There's something about the roots of intelligence testing and eugenics – the designation of certain minds, but more so certain bodies, as deviant – that is constitutive to how we imagine teaching machines and artificial intelligence. I don't know. There's some thread I'm trying to find that ties my "old work" to this new work. I haven't found it yet.

Meanwhile, Brian Merchant says that we're witnessing "the beginning of the end of the generative AI boom." Ed Zitron gloats. Rob Horning responds,

I hope Merchant is right about generative AI because I have grown ashamed of writing the same critiques of it and feeling a false sense of accomplishment. It’s sort of fun for me to write about LLMs because I can indulge my amateur speculations into epistemology and lapse into the kind of literature-major humanism that was seen as passé when I was actually a student. But it increasingly feels like a distraction, tangential to more invasive and menacing forms of automation that, for instance, enable and rationalize wide-scale surveillance, eliminate due process, and systematically classify and stigmatize people. Generative AI is capable of producing mediocrity at an unimaginable scale and unwinding the sittlichkeit accrued over centuries, but relative to the technologies that reproduce inequality and injustice, that are working more directly to make an “ever more degraded and militarized world,” it seems almost utopian, a weapon against ambition, a means of deincentivizing effort and will, evoking a world in which everyone is equally checked out of everything. After all, there are worse things than anti-productivity.