The Fourth Olympic Objective

As everyone knows (unless stuck in a cave somewhere majoring in 'Hermit 101') the Olympic Winter Games are taking place in Sochi, Russia. There we can see athletes from numerous countries striving to reach the three major Olympic objectives: citius, altius, fortius: that is, fastest, highest, strongest.

Noble objectives, and it does the heart good to see young people exerting all effort to meet those objectives. What also does the heart good is the sheer fairness of it all. If you finish first, if you really are the fastest, if you are stronger than your opponents, you win the gold.

To be sure, things are not perfect, given the all too often use of performance-enhancing steroids or the creation of equipment later found to be illegal. But in terms of the system itself, with Olympic officials restricted to being timers, starters and referees, things are about as fair as they can get.

Not a "judge" in sight.

Now I am not certain when Olympic "judges" first appeared. Such creatures were not part of the original Hellenic Games, and I doubt, in their modern reincarnation, Baron de Coubertin welcomed them with open arms. But appear they did, and this brings us to what I term the fourth Olympic objective -- the performance deemed most aesthetic.

Hence "sports" such as figure skating, snowboarding, synchronized swimming, diving, indeed any activity where subjective judgement plays a part, all these require judges to determine that A is more adept, more aesthetically pleasing, than B or C or whomever. We are, then, some distance away from the purity of winning a downhill skiing event, a biathlon or, for that matter, a hockey game. 

Now I hasten to state there is nothing wrong with having an aesthetic event that is so judged. It is just a different sort of animal than a non-aesthetic event. I would then gently suggest a possible solution to illustrate this difference. I would do this through the Olympic medals themselves. The "pure" events would remain as they are, but medals given out at aesthetic events be engraved with a small "A" in the middle.*

This makes sense to me, and now we have four objectives: fastest, highest, strongest, and, wait for it  -- prettiest.

Problem solved.

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The good Lady is being a bit coy here with her "A" suggestion. I am almost certain she had Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hester Prynne in mind. -- Ed.