Blessed are the losers
The Canadian Bible Society is distributing a special New Testament to athletes at the Olympic Games in Vancouver this February. It will include compelling athlete testimonies on discipline, perseverance, victory, faith...and failure. While failure may seem an odd thing to herald while looking ahead to the Olympics, even the casual observer has to admit that the games will have an awful lot of it.
I'm not speaking just of the spectacular failures—the jaw-dropping wipe-outs on the ski slopes, the snowboarders who collide on the final turn, the sparkling ice dancer who ends her routine on her rear end.
I'm referring to the unavoidable fact that the majority of athletes who show up wearing jerseys on their backs and hope on their sleeves will go home empty-handed.
In 2006, 2,508 athletes representing 80 countries showed up for the Winter Games in Turin, Italy. They competed for just 84 Olympic medal spots, only 28 of which were gold.
Even considering the fact that some are team events—which increases the number of actual athletes who get to stand on a podium and wear a medal—that still leaves an awful lot of people without.
Canada, which ranked fifth in the medal count in Turin, fared incredibly well statistically. Sixty-five of our 196 athletes took home medals.
While our official medal count was only 24, each athlete on a winning team took home a medal. This is one major reason to cheer extra hard for the men's hockey team. Were they to ever live up to the women's golden example, they would bump the overall number of medals worn by Team Canada by at least 25.
We did staggeringly well compared to countries like Japan that sent more than 100 athletes and only brought home with one medal. Twenty-six countries went home with nothing.
So perhaps those who don't win medals will be cheered by testimonies like those of speed-skating champion Cindy Klassen.
Klassen is known to Canadian sports-lovers as the first Canadian to win five medals in one Olympics. Few remember that she failed to make the Canadian ice hockey team for the 1998 games.
In her testimony for the Bible Society, Klassen says, "I was devastated when I was cut from the team. I just tried to believe it was God's plan."
She adds, "Jesus is everything to me…I was so aware of His love for me and that He died on the cross for me. He is my shepherd and I am grateful to Him for everything."
Another such testimony is that of bobsledder Chris Lori, who won 22 World Cup medals and is widely regarded as the pilot who took Canadian bobsledding to world class status. Yet he has never won an Olympic medal.
In his testimony, Lori looks back on his sports career with bittersweet memories, especially when talking about the 1992 games when his team missed out on bronze by 0.11 seconds.
"I retired after the 1998 Olympics," Lori says. "We should have won a medal....The team was badly mismanaged, and we failed to produce a medal—a shameful waste of opportunity for which so much was sacrificed.
"Then, when I arrived home my wife told me she was leaving—in a moment's notice. I felt that I had sacrificed so much for my sports career and wound up losing what was most important to me.
"It was when I was in the deepest pit that God was there to pull me out. I had been raised to go to church but it wasn't until the end of my career that I developed a relationship with the Lord. God has now put me in a place where I can handle life, but I realize that I am nothing without Jesus."
Klassen says she hopes that The Bible Society's Scriptures will have an eternal impact for Christ.
Let's hope it starts by showing all those who go home empty-handed that there's a higher prize to be aiming for.
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