That’s an Olympian!

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 20:59:00 +0000

This Sunday, in church, my pastor wanted to talk about bodies. Pastor Debbie is a stocky, solid, strong woman. All week, she’d been watching the Olympics, and all week, she’d been feeling dismayed that she wasn’t as lithe as the swimmers, or as flexible as the gymnasts.

Then she saw 315-pound Reese Hoffa, who won a bronze medal for throwing a 16-pound ball.

“Finally,” she said, “there was someone on TV who looked like me. The shot putter. I was a shot putter in high school.”

I was a long-distance runner in high school. As a sophomore, I was 5-foot-9 and weighed 120 pounds, so lanky my mother forced me to drink a malted milkshake every afternoon. I wanted to play baseball, but even when I could hit the ball, I wasn’t strong enough to hit it out of the infield. So I went out for cross-country and track. While I never won a race, I did earn a varsity letter, and learned a lifelong sport. The Olympics were eight days old before I saw someone who looked like me: Galen Rupp, the 5-foot-11, 134-pound American who won a silver medal in the men’s 10,000.

Salon.com > Ricardo Blas Jr

That’s an Olympian!