February 17, 2026
The Olympics are made up almost entirely of sports I don’t follow. Some sports I forget exist until the next Olympics, some I’ve never heard of. My favorites are the go-fast sports - snowboarding half pipe is the only one I like that involves style points rather than goals or time to determine the winner.
The sports are exciting, but a lot of what we watch the Olympics for are the stories. There are the stories in the race or game (can he make up the time?), the stories that lead into the event (can Lindsay Vonn physically pull it off?), and the stories about athletes (Lucas Pinheiro Braathen who won the first-ever Winter Olympics medal for a South American country, Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych who was disqualified for having images on his helmet of those killed in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine). All of this is embedded in the story of the Olympics themselves, the myth of the ancient competition that unites a fractured world every four years (as NBC keeps reminding us).
The stories are partially true, of course. But also partially not. Braathen was born in Oslo, largely grew up there, and represented Norway in international events until a few years ago. The random Red Sox fan and Yankees fan who happen to share a phone to watch the games are actors (as a Red Sox fan, that one stretches credulity). The Olympics are a global financial empire, no one works there solely out of the good of their hearts.
And yet, we watch the games and love the stories.
In this way, the Olympics are no different than the rest of our lives. We tell stories about GW and SMPA (“Only at GW” moments, #SMPAProud). You tell stories to make sense of the grades you earn and the internships you get (or don’t get). We tell stories about politics and politicians, our families, and ourselves. We are made of stories.
Stories help us make sense of a confusing world. They explain where we came up, help us understand where we are, and shape what to do next. Stories are important, and inevitable, tools required to manage the challenge of being human.
Stories are also necessarily incomplete. They fill in gaps in ways that make sense but that may not be fully accurate. That's OK, because accuracy isn't the point, the point is explanatory power. Things happen and we come up with reasons why. We assign victims and villains, and ascribe them motives. Events only have the meanings we give them. Because our stories are never fully accurate, we can change them. We can tell our own stories about our fates and our futures. We can’t change facts, but we can change what those facts mean.
Vonn is an amazing skier who hooked her arm on a gate. Those are facts. What we do with those facts is up to us.