The Olympics will inspire a new generation to live their best life

We may not top the Paris medal tally but our athletes will inspire a nation of kids to play sport. Just as Mexico City’s Olympics in 1968 inspired me as an 11-year-old.

The Olympic Rings displayed at the construction site of the Eiffel Tower Stadium for the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympics and Paralympic Games. Picture: AFP

The first Olympics I recall watching on television was Mexico City 1968, when I was 11. I was inspired by Australia’s Michael Wenden winning gold and setting a world record of 52.2 seconds for the 100m freestyle.

Australian Olympian Michael Wenden.

The following summer I joined the local swimming club and quickly became acquainted with early rises and the need to swim solitary lap after solitary lap in training. Needless to say I never reached Olympic heights but I did learn life lessons like the value of focus and discipline.

Mexico City was the Olympics in which America’s Dick Fosbury won gold in the high jump with his unorthodox Fosbury Flop. Fosbury reimagined the way a technical task could be completed more efficiently. It’s an example of how sport can inspire creative thinking; it prompts the question, what else can be reimagined?

I love everything about the Olympics. The athletes’ back stories. The elation of winning, the heartbreak of loss, the foolishness of celebrating a win before crossing the finish line. I am enthralled by the evolution of tactics (speed skating in particular) and technology (especially in the velodrome, where wheel spokes have given way to aerodynamic discs).

I even like hearing – and silently evaluating – other countries’ national anthems at medal ceremonies. I know Russian athletes aren’t competing in Paris under the Russian flag, but is there a more moving national anthem than Russia’s? I also like the US national anthem, which concludes with the glorious words “O’er the land of the free/And the home of the brave.” America’s anthem makes me wonder, what are we Australians the home of? And what is a common truth, a joint aspiration, all Australians can get behind?

Some of Paris’s events, such as the marathon, will take place outside the main stadiums – which invariably provides Australian television viewers with an opportunity to play their favourite game: “We’ve been there … we stood right there!”

And the surfing competition is being held in (French) Tahiti, which I think sets a precedent for Brisbane 2032 to consider holding events such as, say, mountain bike riding in parts of Queensland far from the capital – such as the Daintree or Kuranda. Let’s spread the Olympic love across the entirety of Queensland.

We Australians see ourselves as a sporty lot, and not unreasonably so. In global terms Australia is a young, first-world nation with an outdoorsy culture. I haven’t done the numbers but I suspect we have more swimming pools, tennis courts and recreation facilities per capita than many other developed nations. We dominated tennis and swimming in the 1950s and 1960s when much of Europe was still recovering from WWII. This experience set a cultural expectation of sporting prowess (if not dominance) that carries through to today.

Every Australian athlete in Paris will have a story of how their family, their community, got behind them. These are nation-building attributes and values. We may not top the Paris medal tally but our athletes will inspire a nation of kids, of 11-year-olds like I was, to play sport, ultimately involving their families and communities. And they may go on to apply the lessons of sport to the rest of their lives.