Ah, Certainty!

For a moment I thought another plane had crashed. My wife was watching TV in the next room, when suddenly I heard moaning and then, “Oh, no!” The phone rang not 10 sec. later–my mother-in-law. “Did you see it?” she said. Her voice was loud and agitated. She demanded to speak with her daughter. I was worried.

A few minutes later, I found out what was wrong: a pair of Canadian figure skaters had been cheated out of a gold medal by dicey judging. In other words, no one had died–a huge relief. But try telling that to my Canadian mother-in-law. She called every hour for the rest of the evening, breathless with news of scandal and skulduggery. The unfairness! The horror! Her outrage was infectious. When I sat down to watch the Olympics the next night, I felt excitable too and strangely absorbed–not only by the skating controversy but by the Games in general. I was hooked. In a way that I hadn’t foreseen when I had turned on the seemingly endless opening ceremonies a couple of days earlier, I had gone from being a casual observer to an edge-of-my-seat obsessive. A fanatic.

And it felt good. To immerse oneself in this perfect snow-globe universe of skis and skates and sleds, finish lines and stopwatches and scorecards, was to live in a smaller, more manageable world than had seemed possible before the torch was lit, in this winter of Afghanistan and Enron.

Maybe it all comes down to rules. Outside the Olympic Village’s tidy confines, there don’t seem to be any lately. Suddenly, civilians are targets in war. Suddenly, the job of an accountant is not to total up a client’s profits but to hide its losses. Suddenly, advances in technology seem to lead to economic setbacks. But not at the Olympics. The rules still count there, even when they are broken or mislaid, as in the figure-skating meltdown. It wasn’t a puzzle, this miscarriage of justice–the world saw it clearly and almost simultaneously. One could judge for oneself what had happened and what it meant, and feel confident in that judgment. Ah, certainty! The Russians slipped up, and the Canadians didn’t, and any outcome that didn’t reflect this fact, however official, simply wasn’t legitimate. Not in my house.

When actual storm clouds loom on the horizon–terrorism, recession, government scandal–people long for a tempest in a teapot. That’s just what the skating brouhaha provided, and it’s what the Games provide as a whole. The fog of war, which we hear so much about these days, doesn’t apply on the men’s downhill course or the bobsled track. The distances of Olympic events are fixed. Five hundred meters. A thousand. No more, no fewer. The times are measured to the hundredth of a second by instruments that don’t waver. No messy relativism. And the judges–however fallible or mischievous–are monitored by a clear-eyed worldwide audience, not a secretive Big Five accounting firm.

This is how sports are always supposed to work–as allegories for deeper human conflicts, not merely as displays of strength and skill–but what’s different now is how desperately we need them to and how grateful we are when they succeed. While I don’t feel entirely satisfied with the clever Solomonic compromise that settled the figure-skating issue (why not just chop the one gold medal in half?), I’m glad that the lofty figures behind the scenes finally acted. I’m tired of hung juries. I’m tired of not knowing whether Osama bin Laden is alive or dead. I’m tired of corporate balance sheets that don’t balance.

Especially nowadays, I want results. Gold, silver or bronze. No tin, no plastic. None of that mystery alloy the government uses in those oddly light, play-money quarters it has been minting.

That’s why I feel myself drawn to this year’s Games with a fervor I didn’t quite expect: every night, dependably and wonderfully, they deliver small, verifiable results. There’s suspense first, of course, but it’s tolerable suspense–nothing like waiting for Congress to vote on campaign-finance legislation or sitting through a year of Enron hearings to find out whether the poker-faced Ken Lay is history’s biggest con man or sorriest dupe. It was nip and tuck there for a while before Bode Miller finally took the silver in the men’s combined downhill, but only for a while.

Definite endings. The Olympics offer those too. There may be no time limit to the war on terrorism. And the recession, depending on whom you talk to, is either over, about to end or somewhere in between. But when the lugers break that laser beam, that’s it, no do-overs, no instant replays. How quaint, in a way, and how profoundly comforting: numbers that mean something, numbers that stay put, unlike the closing figures on the Dow.

And when the Olympics themselves end, as they must…? I’d rather not think about that. Yet.