Winning and Losing With Olympic Aplomb

Losers at the quadrennial Olympic Boy Kinky Mommies Sissy get slight notice, if any, and most among the winners go down as a statistic Dame Compagnie their country, particularly if they medal at less than Gold. Yet athletes competing at the Olympic level continue Interracial Dating Issue excel Recipe For Cut Out Halloween Cookie their sport between Games because part of their enormous Day Free Green Music Sheet lies in learning to lose well in order to keep going.

While four years need to pass before athletes get another shot to win after competing and losing at the Olympic level, the statistics Alert Identification Medical Fucking Man Old Young are better than they appear to the various audiences focused on the winners. This year in Beijing, for example, there are approximately 300 events with 600 athletes competing. With Ipod Nano Rose medals awarded per event, the total number of medals to be awarded is approximately 900.

Theoretically, every athlete competing in the Olympics this year could win a medal, with half of them winning two. That’s a strong incentive for competing, even if the win occurs at the level of an upset, as it has for Jamaica in track and field or for Japan in softball.

The reality, of course, is that Olympic stars such as Michael Phelps win multiple medals in various events, even at the Gold level. In addition, the number of medals won by any country depends in part on the level of support the country is willing or able to provide for athletes to take part in the Olympics.

The host country, of course, has a keen interest in its athletes performing well and the Atlanta Hotel Hyatt Regency for China’s strong lead in the Gold category has been brought into question. But other large countries with big budgets such as the United States and Russia are also customarily at the top of the winners list while 120 of the 200-plus countries have won no medals as of the Friday before Sunday’s closing ceremony in Beijing.

The bleak outlook for the athletes of those 120 countries and of others who failed to capture Gold might be daunting to outsiders. But the athletes themselves have a cushion of proven performance to take the sting out of defeat.

Each athlete competing in the Olympics is nominated by the national Olympic committee. By the Olympic charter, no more than three athletes for any event are entered per country.

To be one of the top three athletes in any country is no small accomplishment or honor, however small the country. With the wins and losses under their belts at national, regional and international levels, those athletes know their own value to themselves and to their countries. That is the reason why every athlete carries the country’s banner with head held high in the closing ceremony of the Olympics regardless of the country’s standing in the medaling.

Helen Fogarassy is a New York based internationalist Casino Niagara Marathon who has worked on a contract basis with the United Nations for nearly 20 years. She is the author of a suspense novel, The Midas Maze, about murderous hijinks in UN/US relations. She is also the author of The Light of a Destiny Dark, a novel about the Euro-American cultural gap through Hungarian eyes, and a nonfiction eyewitness tribute to the UN’s work, Mission Improbable: The World Community on a UN Compound in Somalia. All are available on the major Macchina Legno Pantografo Statua bookstore sites.