In the short story Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut, the U.S. Constitution mandates that all people must be fully equal. Those who are strong must be restrained by weights so that they are no more athletic than anyone else. The good-looking must be masked so they are no more attractive. The intelligent must wear earpieces that disrupt their lines of thought so they are no smarter. And so on.
In the story, the title character’s parents watch a ballet on TV, with the beautiful, athletic dancers masked and weighed down. If everyone is to be fully equal, the best must be encumbered so they perform no better than the clumsy. Harrison himself is highly intelligent and physically imposing, a towering 7 feet tall at only 14 years old but encumbered by 300 pounds of equalizing iron. In our real world, Harrison would be an Olympic shot put champion or basketball star. But in the dull world in which his dystopian story takes place, in which equity and inclusion are regarded as more important than freedom and high achievement, he is forced to be no stronger or better than anyone else. Everyone fits a supposed ideal voiced by Vice President Kamala Harris when she opined that all of us “should end up in the same place.”
Fortunately, that place has, at least for the most part, been Paris this summer. For a little over two weeks every four years, the Olympic Games provide the greatest sports and entertainment spectacle the world can produce. Billions of people from all over the planet tune in to see who in the world can run the fastest, swim the fastest, jump the highest, or perform the greatest feats of athleticism in gymnastics.
The Olympics are meant to exemplify excellence. While the elite athletes we see on our screen make everything look easy, we know they are performing extraordinary feats that are anything but. If what they were doing was easy, Olympic medals would not be as revered as they are now, as symbols of achievement far beyond the reach of normal people. They represent years of dedication, day after day of patience, discipline, and an unceasing drive to be great.
Take, for instance, Simone Biles, the most decorated gymnast in history. She has won six gold medals in three Olympic Games to go with a record 23 world championship gold medals and six all-around world titles. To train for this, Biles conditions herself in several sports. Her cross-training includes swimming more than a mile twice a week or biking 10 miles once a week. Sometimes that biking is replaced by running a mile before practicing her gymnastic routines.
If not this cross-training, Biles is doing 11 rounds of ab workouts that, even when shortened to a 15-minute session, are enough to leave a normal person sore for days: several sets of superman holds, superman pulses, hollow holds, hollow pulses, situps, and more. All this is before she even gets to practicing actual gymnastic technique. Biles often trains twice a day, six days a week, for a total of seven hours each day. Before the 2016 Rio Olympics, she would practice from 9 a.m. to noon and again from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. It was this work, added to preternatural talent, that helped her walk away with four gold medals.
Now take all of that and remember that Biles began gymnastics at the age of 6 and began training with a coach at the age of 8. She is now 27 and has put in two decades of hard work, including 13 years of elite competition. That’s what it takes to be the best.
It may seem that just about anyone could be an Olympian. Biles is just 4-foot-8 and she has reached the top. Surely there is a sport for people of all heights and body types. But, of course, not everyone has the natural athleticism of Biles and other Olympians, and almost no one has that level of commitment, drive, and patience to work continuously for half a day, every day, for years.
That is why we watch. We want to see the result of an unrivaled talent combined with almost unmatched striving. It is a glorious sight. It takes the breath away. It would not be worth the fanfare if everyone was equalized to “end up in the same place.” Thus, the Olympics stand in contrast to the tenets of diversity, equity, and inclusion and other manifestations of extreme egalitarianism with which left-wing ideology has infected academia, entertainment, and corporate life. In the world of DEI and other forms of post-Marxism, effort is replaced by laziness and awards and so-called rights are handed out based on identity rather than earned through sweat and tears.
In the DEI world, standards are lowered so that everything is “inclusive.” That is how, for example, you can become the president of Harvard University with a scant academic record built on plagiarism. It is also how you end up with a military that lowers physical standards so supposed achievement is available to women and older men who cannot meet the standards set for young, fit men. It is why there has been a largely successful left-wing effort to eliminate standardized testing for admission to universities and programs for gifted people, even though this move, camouflaged in the garb of inclusiveness, harms poorer students who cannot fudge their extracurricular resume to game admissions departments. Test scores create a standard, which isn’t “inclusive,” and so the Left wants it eliminated.
We all know this is wrong. When someone refers to an Olympic standard, you know that person means excellence. Such excellence appeals to our imaginations, indeed to our human nature, for we have evolved, like other species, with the survival of the fittest. At the Olympics, everyone strives to be the strongest, the fastest, or simply the best. We all understand that we must strive to be more successful in every area of our lives because that is what we have been hardwired to do. That is what registers as we watch the Olympics and how we manage to connect with the best athletes on the planet despite not being able to do half of what they do.
It is also why even those who embrace DEI quotas often want to conceal their intentions. Even they recognize that hiring people based on their race or gender is unpopular, against our inherent sense of fairness and desire for excellence. It is unpopular even among the demographic groups that reap the spoils of this unjust and uninspiring system. Even those adhering to the principles of DEI pay lip service to meritocracy when questioned. Look at the media backlash at the labeling of Harris as a “DEI hire,” even though President Joe Biden narrowed his criteria to black women before making his vice presidential pick. The DEI boosters cannot have it both ways.
No one would watch the Olympics if participants were chosen by quotas instead of performance. There would be nothing to admire, no sacrifice to respect, and no accomplishments to cheer. It would be like the Harrison Bergeron ballet, in which every performer is replaceable because he or she has been made identical to everyone else to produce identical results. It would be not just absurd and unjust but also boring. We refer to “standout” performances. We don’t want performances that blend in.
But the Olympics are not immune from the toxicity of DEI. At the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, a 43-year-old man was allowed to compete in women’s weightlifting, taking the spot of a 21-year-old Tongan woman and depriving her of a trip to the games for which she had trained for much of her life. That man, Laurel Hubbard, did not make the trip because of hard work, a drive to be great, or high achievement. He could not have competed with other men. He made it because he enjoyed natural genetic and biological advantages, even at age 43, over the younger women who had done it the right way.
This decay grew worse at the 2024 Paris Games. Two boxers who failed genetic tests, according to the International Boxing Association, were allowed to fight in the women’s competitions. The International Olympic Committee thus put on a barbaric and decadent spectacle. When the IBA disqualified the two from the Women’s World Boxing Championships last year, Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting declined to appeal and Algeria’s Imane Khelif withdrew an appeal. This meant both Khelif and Lin could participate in Paris and win medals. Their fights shocked the world. Accomplished Italian boxer Angela Carini withdrew from her fight with Khelif in under a minute, saying she had never been hit so hard in her life. Of course she hadn’t. She had to choose her safety at the cost of her long-standing dream because of the corrupt and immoral egalitarianism of the games’ organizers. The IOC justified including the boxers because they were listed as female on their passports. It would not have been inclusive to decide otherwise, but it would have been right.
The tenets of DEI state that anyone who wishes to be a woman and enter women’s spaces and events must be accommodated regardless of biological reality. The result wasn’t just dangerous and unfair but also, in a sense, boring, for the outcome was very nearly a foregone conclusion, the antithesis of sport.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
This debacle and the IOC’s “inclusive” policies for women’s sports will hang over the 2024 Paris Olympics, a stain on what the Olympics are supposed to stand for — the excellence of those naturally talented athletes who work the hardest and fire the imaginations of so many people all over the Earth.
DEI, whether in fictional dance performances or in actual sports, erodes the values we prize in the Olympics. We all wish to witness the emotional payoff for athletes who achieve success. It isn’t entertaining if that opportunity is deprived of them in order to fit into DEI principles, or if we know everyone is going to “end up in the same place.” DEI is the death of merit, effort, fairness, and fun. If we aren’t careful, it will be the death of the greatest sporting showcase of the world’s best athletes as well.
Zachary Faria is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.