Femke Bol after her bronze race in the 400 meter hurdles in Paris © Rebecca Blackwell/ AP Photo/ ANP
You don’t have to be a novelist to sense that stories are not in what should happen, but in what shouldn’t happen. So the fact that the team sprinters win gold on the cycling track is hardly a story; they always win gold. The fact that Sharon van Rouwendaal won gold in the 10-kilometre open water swimming didn’t really have to be an exceptionally memorable story, because she won that gold more often. But at the finish she burst into tears and spoke about her dog during the entire winning interview. Dog Rio had died shortly before. ‘My world collapsed, nothing was important anymore.’ That’s how the deceased dog, Rio, suddenly became a story.
Would a gold medal by Femke Bol be The Story? Rarely has anything been more anticipated. In The Green British essayist Geoff Dyer described Bol’s suppleness: ‘A feature of that beauty is the illusion of effortlessness and an abundance of grace. Gravity seems to press less on some athletes than on others (hence Ali’s words for ‘floating like a butterfly’) and as a result – I am aware that I am in danger of losing myself here in the mysteries of physics – time is stretched.’
This was the Femke Bol of the 4 x 400 meter mixed relay last Saturday. The Femke Bol who entered the final round in fourth place and finished first. And exactly as Dyer put it: she ran the fastest, without giving the impression that she was running fast. While you saw her competitors come to a standstill, you only saw Bol moving forward, you only saw relaxation on her face, relaxation in her steps. The gold did not seem like a superhuman achievement, but a completely natural thing.
This was the Femke Bol story that NOS fully committed to, the Femke Bol who was the eye-catcher in every commercial for and every preview of the Olympic Games. She was our Frodo, our face, she had to do it, the heroine avant la lettre, the Netherlands’ hope. Femke Bol: a name from a C. Joh. Kieviet book. Femke Bol: our nation turns its lonely eye to you.
Thursday night, at her distance, the 400 meter hurdles, she lost not only gold, but silver as well. That was a story.
An hour and a half earlier, there was a different story. This one didn’t have to be a spectacular story either: the Netherlands is one of a handful of countries that takes hockey very seriously, and despite the fact that we – we, yes – haven’t won a men’s gold since Sydney, an Olympic hockey final is the rule rather than the exception.
So the whole of the Netherlands watched with the board on their laps as Oranje striker Duco Telgenkamp scored the decisive shoot-out against Germany. Plates of nasi and plates of spaghetti flew through the air, satay sauce against the ceiling. Gold! Men’s hockey gold! But by the time the plates landed on the parquet, the joy had cooled again. Germans were furious, the stadium fell silent, nobody understood what was happening. Until the replay showed how Telgenkamp had provoked the German goalkeeper after his winning shoot-out.
Telgenkamp had run up to him and put his finger on his mouth. Shhh. Later Telgenkamp explained that the goalie had provoked him, by saying beforehand that the Dutch hockey men were afraid of the Germans. Telgenkamp also lived with a story in his head.
But that story didn’t make it. The dominant story was that of the finger-on-the-lips: apart from Paolo Di Canio, who once gave the Hitler salute after a winning goal, the finger-on-the-lips is the worst cheering gesture imaginable. On Tinder it would be an immediate red flag. Cyclists are guilty of it, footballers regularly. If you want to silence your critics, winning is the best way to do it – then you don’t have to do it again. In fact, whoever does it, shows himself, shows that he is more concerned with his critics than with his win. He shows bitterness.
The camera followed Telgenkamp, who tried to shake it off in the further festivities, but the win was tainted. It dominated the news. The finger on the lips: it is the gesture of the winner who shows himself to be a loser.
When Femke Bol crossed the finish line in third place, the stadium did not fall silent (winner Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone ran a world record), but tens or hundreds of thousands (or millions?) of living rooms in the Netherlands did. ‘The faster she runs, the more at ease she seems’, wrote Geoff Dyer and everyone – still sitting on the couch – had seen her lose her ease, become sour, but narrowly won bronze.
Defeat, tears. Bol went to her parents for comfort. Then she walked through the stadium, defeated and bewildered. Lieke Klaver had run a failed 400-meter semi-final and when she came to the NOS reporter in tears, he said – humanity above all – ‘You can walk on once, you know.’ And so she did not give an interview. Bol did come in front of the NOS camera. Perplexed. Devastated. She wanted to run her best race, and ran her worst. You sympathized with the fact that she had to give an interview at such a moment.
And then the interview was over. She could continue. She was done with it. But she turned back to the NOS reporter. Look, these are stories. This is how heroes are made. She turned back to the NOS reporter and said that she wanted to thank everyone, that she had received so much support from all the fans and that it meant a lot to her.
On Instagram, Prime Minister Schoof congratulated Van Rouwendaal and the hockey men. For whatever reason, he only congratulates gold winners. This cabinet apparently has a top sports mentality: only gold counts. If you’re not first, you’re last.
Yeah, okay, I’m sentimental now, but still: that moment when Bol returned after her loss interview, and thanked everyone. That’s how you can lose and still be a great champion. I would have shared that story if I were Schoof.
