'Steiner had lifted the weight of the world from his shoulders; if only for a night.'

There is an abstract, purist, absurdity to competitive athletics, wherein lies a significant portion of its beauty and appeal. Take the 100m dash for example, it can be reduced to getting from point A to point B as fast as one can on foot. The running is not one aspect of a set of skills for a game - like football, where you might sprint past the opponent to get the ball. The act of running is the focus itself. Likewise, the high jump or the long jump, the discus or javelin - they are the simplest of aims taken to an extreme. The blunt simplicity of the objectives, throw an object as far as possible - jump as high as possible, allows the greatest potential for metaphor and symbolism; notably commitment for the sake of commitment, and the yearning to outdo one’s self and fellow competitors, but far more beyond this. It is easy to see how these activities in times gone by were the basis of a community’s survival: to outrun a wild animal, to be able to throw a spear to get food, each of these activities can be overlaid upon a prehistoric survival situation or a militaristic one. A modern sporting event takes these contexts away; the physical activities are now presented in an abstracted, sponsored, televised, aestheticized void. It is an equivalent of presenting the ‘readymade’ as artwork.

Yet we resist these removals. No sooner one context is removed another emerges in its place. It is not by chance that so much of the Olympic sports coverage and commentary seeks to find the ‘story’ for each athletic achievement - conscious of our watching organized, bloodless, regulated conflict and the unnaturalness of this (as opposed to the conflict of war, or hunting, or even the original Olympic games involvement of sacrifice to Zeus) the athlete’s story is constantly searched for, a replacement for the campfire report of ‘x’ who hunted the boar across the landscape until it collapsed in exhaustion.

Sports commentator, Simon Barnes, writes of the Beijing Olympic Weightlifting champion: “Steiner had lifted the weight of the world from his shoulders if only for a night”. Barnes’ allusion to Atlas here, the Titan condemned to support the cosmos on his shoulders, is an apt one. Steiner expressed a frenetic joy immediately after his victory. (Which has caught the imagination of Youtube montagists) However, on the medal podium he received his gold holding a picture of his recently dead wife, who died in a car accident last year. It was she to whom the medal was dedicated. It was the sorrow of her memory that Barnes intuits had been momentarily lifted. Above we have a photograph of a man holding a photograph. It creates a ‘twisty-turny-pully effect’: He is himself, the woman is represented through a 2-d image - she, we know, is dead, he is alive. Photography and death appear in constant tango. Of course since they are both in the photo - they are reduced to the same dimensions. He holds the photo the way many athletes hold their medals for photo opportunities - he holds it at a similar height, in the same front facing way a medal is usually held, so that it is parallel to the eventual photograph and readable. The actual medal shares a hand with the obligatory bunch of flowers, it is not given the ‘platform’ of the her photo. So her image becomes a symbolic substitute, or displacement, for the medal. Something as light as a photography in the place of a metal medal is fixating. One imagines the photo bearing as much emotional ‘weight’ as the dumbbells bore physical weight. It is seductive to imagine her gently aiding him in the lift, bracing his trembling knees, like a caryatid, sharing the weight with him for the obligatory two seconds before he let it fall. In sound-tracking otherwise standard sports footage of this lift with romantic ballads the Youtube video makers seem to have been seduced likewise.