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Opening Ceremony of the Moscow Olympics in 1980 boycotted by USA, Germany, and the UK ©Olympic Panorama
BLITZ 19
I have always hated watching sports, particularly on TV. When I was a child, Saturday’s Sportschau on the German channel was my father’s church. Unlike many who are passionate about the program, he has always been very active and still is an avid skier, biker, and sailor. Occasionally he took me to the soccer stadium to watch Bayern München’s soccer team play. The chain-smoking, beer-guzzling men in the stands talking shop fascinated me more than those chasing the ball on the field. That changed in the summer of 1980 during the Moscow Olympics. Following the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, the US, UK, and Germany boycotted the games. I was a child and spent the summer at my grandparents’ in Italy. There was always a TV blaring somewhere. I remember being our favorite no-frills Pizzeria where a women’s race was broadcast from a barstool. I was mesmerized by the race’s technical detail. In multiple slow-motion replays, the women’s milliseconds at the finish line revealed the actual winner. Close-ups, trembling muscles, exerted faces. I was right there, live in Moscow!
I do not recall the winner, but I do remember feeling deeply embarrassed by the broadcasting technology. Until recently, I had been convinced that special slow-motion actors performed this kind of slowdown on screens. My brother and I had been practicing for a career in the field. We often pantomimed elaborate duels, groaning with distorted voices, rehearsed with a turntable. All summer, we’d worked underwater to achieve the desired effects with hair. The Moscow Olympics had upset my naive misconception. I avoided my younger brother’s disappointed glare.
A critical examination of my subjectivity and perception of time and space followed this seminal realization. From now on, I often imagined myself from far away during my various athletic practices, zooming in on my face as if through a telephoto lens and analyzing my movement in slow motion. I reflected on how my speed on a bicycle would be perceived by an overtaking car. I wondered if aliens in the future could see the booger I extracted from my nose today, a glistening thread holding on to the tip of my nostril.
I still indulge in these time travel dialectics while running when things get a little tricky or I want to give up. I look at myself from a bird's eye view, running at 100 frames per second, trying to be both more present and zoned out. What if I could fast-forward in my head to that day’s finishing line? If I reach a state of meditative flow, I almost succeed in these mind games. With GPS and live streaming, this hallucinatory experience of bending the time and space continuum has become even more tangible.
Last Sunday, for example, when I woke up in Brooklyn and opened the Berlin Marathon app, Eliud Kipchoge had already broken his own world record in an astounding 02:01:09. Tigist Assefa surprised in her second marathon with the third-best woman finish of 2:15:38, a course record. My friends’ colorful symbols were still crawling over Berlin’s 2D course map. At the same time, news blitzed in our Girls Run NYC Whatsapp chat. We applauded when C’s square symbol picked up speed and blazed through the home stretch. Cheers erupted when J soon after PRd. A little further behind, crossing the Spree river, M seemed to run out of breath. Her green circle stopped moving. Our New York audience grew tense, and all-caps text bubbles volleyed over the WhatsApp screen.
Then E reached M, and they idled at what seemed like a fluid station. We all speed-typed expletive-laden encouragements into the keyboards and across the Atlantic. Finally, both M’s and E’s symbols inched on and turned into Straße des 17. Juni. When they crossed the finish line at the Brandenburg Gate, my heart raced. I was still in bed but felt totally exhausted. Time for a coffee.
September 2022
