No, Olympic silver is not the new gold

Eric Lobbecke

WHO'S to say that Rudyard Kipling was right when he counselled us to treat "those two imposters" triumph and disaster just the same. Though admirable, this 1895 invocation of keeping a stiff upper lip and treating victory and defeat with equal grace, surely goes against the messy, complicated, wondrous nature of the human spirit. Our Olympic athletes have displayed the full gamut of human emotions. And so they should. Manufactured emotion has no place in any sporting arena.

The Olympic Games are a two-week whirlwind of human endeavour, triumph and disaster. And so it pays to reflect upon the comments of long jumper and Games debutant Mitchell Watt. After winning Australia's 12th silver medal on Saturday night, falling 15cm short of the winner, the 24-year-old reproached media reporting of Australia's efforts at the London Games.

He told us to "wake up", stop the negative reports and celebrate all the medals, the gold medal won by our girls in the 4x100 freestyle relay and the growing list of silver and bronze. He's right. And he's wrong too. Winning and losing is a complicated, highly personal affair. Athletes themselves don't always celebrate a silver medal in the way Watt has done.

Swimmer James Magnussen, for example, was utterly dejected after his 100m freestyle defeat in the pool last week. He missed out on gold by a fingernail. His devastation had not abated by the time the 21-year-old stood on the podium to accept his silver medal. There were no smiles. No joy when the silver medal adorned his swimmer's neck. Only raw disappointment at not winning gold. Yet a member of the Foxtel Olympic commentary team admonished him for failing to show sufficient grace in the face of his loss. He was criticised for failing to act in the same cheerful way the Aussie girls did after they won silver in the 4x200 freestyle relay.

This kind of commentary is unhelpful and foolish. The young swimmer from Port Macquarie sought sporting immortality and didn't find it. Watt is happy winning a silver medal. Magnussen is not. These highly charged and deeply emotional responses to defeat reveal the complexity and glory of sport. Forget the pre-programmed responses favoured by sports spinmeisters and those in the Foxtel commentary box. Watt's response to losing is as legitimate as that of Magnussen.

In a similar vein, many condemned those few female swimmers who teared up after losing in the pool. But who among us can know what it is to fail when the country expects so much from them? Emily Seebohm set an Olympic record of 58.23 seconds in her 100m backstroke heat. She would have won gold had she repeated that performance in the final. After her loss, she shed tears of disappointment. Allow her that unaffected reaction. And then, a day later, she came to terms with her silver medal. "I'm really happy," she said the following day. Allow her that, too.

Let our young sportsmen and women express their emotions in all their raw natural beauty. More useful criticism came when former Olympian and Foxtel commentator Susie O'Neill focused on the in-pool performance of our swimmers. Was there a serious enough work ethic, she wondered aloud? It is a fair question given the lacklustre performance of our swimming team is the worst in 36 years. We are missing a Shane Gould, a Dawn Fraser, a Murray Rose, a Kieran Perkins, a Grant Hackett, an Ian Thorpe, a Madame Butterfly.

That said, let us pay credit where it is due. Lack of gold notwithstanding, let us marvel at the myriad human reactions to triumph and defeat. Take Magnussen. For most of his adult life and probably much of his childhood, he has swum up and down the length of a pool, staring at a black line in the hope of Olympic glory. We can hardly imagine the painstaking mornings of training and sacrifices made by men and women such as Magnussen. The young man who, prior to the Olympics was the 100m freestyle world champion, greeted his second place at the Olympic event as lost gold. Good on him. We need more like him. Magnussen encapsulates what it means to compete at the Olympics. He didn't come to London to have fun in the Olympic village. He came to London to win gold. Silver didn't rate in his mind.

Another example of the glorious gamut of emotions on show in London: the gorgeous Bronte Barratt celebrated her bronze medal in a way Magnussen couldn't celebrate silver. And who's to say which response is right? We ought to allow our Olympians the freedom to treat victory and defeat in a manner that comes naturally to them.

Unlike any other sport in the Olympic Games, there is an Australian obsession with winning gold medals in the pool. We are, after all, so used to winning them. That partly explains why the expectations of Australians for our swimmers are so extraordinarily high. It explains the tears and the despondency when our swimmers lose. And there is, of course, a direct correlation between the level of despondency and the length of time between opportunities for glory. In this case, four long years of more training and more sacrifices will pass until there is a chance to win gold.

Sport is surely an enduring puzzle. Coming second or third in many sports is considered irrelevant. It is said of golf that no one remembers who came second, no matter how close the score. Except when it's Greg Norman. Think Augusta 1996 when the Shark led by six shots on the Saturday night only to lose to Nick Faldo the next day. Remembering second place is the exception, not the rule in sport. Yet every four years at the Olympics, we hand out gold, silver and bronze medals. Why do we celebrate second and third in some arenas and not in others? And why, if we do hand out medals for second and third place, do we assume that the winners of those medals ought to show grace in what is, after all, a defeat. Silver is not the new gold. Not even for a nation now struggling in the gold medal count after a proud history of success.