For me as an autistic person, the Olympics is one of the most exciting things in the world, and also one of the most torturous. Sports are one of my special interests, so one would think that the Olympics would be heaven for me, with two and a half weeks of non-stop coverage of gymnastics, swimming, diving, track and field, equestrian, fencing, shooting, and more. But this is the exact reason why the Olympics have the potential to become my own personal hell. A hell filled with overwhelm, stress, chaos, mental exhaustion, and information overload.
I will start by explaining why I love Olympic sports so much. I think what I like most about watching sports is that they have clear procedures, rules, and processes for determining the winner. Every sport has a system, whether that consists of judges giving scores for each competitor’s routine, a horse and rider receiving faults for each rail they knock down, or simply a clock determining who crosses the finish line first. No one knows in advance who the winner is going to be, but one can expect that the competition will unfold according to a familiar and predictable process. For me, watching a sports competition means watching it in its entirety, from beginning to end. It means watching all the coverage that is available. I love to watch the entire process unfold, from the opening video montage, to the heats with dozens of competitors that no one has ever heard of, to the semifinals, to the finals, to the post-race interviews of the winner(s).
As anyone who has glimpsed the Olympics broadcast schedule knows, the sheer amount of coverage is so huge that it is impossible for one person to watch it all. And this makes my brain go crazy. I have a perfectionistic, completionist mindset, to put it mildly. I am a very all-or-nothing person. If I am into something, I tend to become really obsessed with it. If I like something, I am not content merely to have a little bit of it; I want all of it. I find it preferable not to do something at all, than to do it in a way that falls short of my standards of completeness. So when the Olympics come around every two years, I don’t want to miss any of the coverage. I want to watch it all. But because of the enormous amount of coverage, missing some of it is unavoidable. The result is having to make excruciating, nearly impossible decisions about which events to watch and which to miss.
Leading up to this Olympics, I knew that it was going to be a challenge. I knew that difficult decisions would need to be made. I knew that I would likely need to set my alarm in the morning, that I might need to record certain events to watch later, and that I would have to minimize (and carefully time) outings outside of my house. But I was up for a challenge. I was mentally prepared, and I was excited. I had spent hours upon hours catching up on all of the Olympic trials coverage that I had missed over the past couple of months due to my work schedule. I had worked hard to put myself in a position that would give me the best possible chance at success.
Watching the hour-long intro show that aired before the very first events of the Games – preliminary soccer matches that took place two days before the opening ceremony – I was happy and optimistic. The video montages were exciting and the commentary interesting. Everything was elegant and appealing, from the NBC studio in Paris, to the pictograms that represent each sport, to the fonts and graphics used during the broadcast. It was particularly cool to see images of the statues, monuments, and famous buildings in Paris, and I was hopeful that watching the Games unfold among these iconic landmarks would be somewhat healing after the traumatic events involving statues that I’ve detailed at length in previous blog posts.
But then, shortly before the opening ceremony on Friday, June 26, I checked the TV listings for the following day (Saturday) in preparation for planning a watching strategy. And what I saw made me sick to my stomach. Watching these Olympics was not going to be a challenge; it was going to be impossible.
The competitions started as early as 3:30 in the morning and continued throughout the entire morning and afternoon, usually on 3 or even 4 networks at once. The idea of waking up at 3:30 seemed ridiculous, but recording these events would not work either, because there was no window of sports-free time later in the day in which to watch them. And missing out on these events would be completely unacceptable. The sports taking place at ungodly hours weren’t limited to the ones that I (comparatively) don’t care much about, such as soccer, handball, rugby, cycling, table tennis, badminton, and wrestling. Nor were they merely “borderline” sports like rowing, kayaking, and archery. The ridiculously early sports included my favorites, such as equestrian, diving, swimming, and gymnastics. Missing those would defeat the entire purpose of watching the Olympics.
In other words, even after narrowing down the sports as much as I possibly could, even after eliminating all but the absolute must-watch events… the amount was still not even close to being manageable.
So my brain exploded. I screamed at the top of my lungs, again and again and again. I pounded my feet on the floor. I punched the walls and the couch. I threw various objects.
After this explosion of rage, I made the decision to boycott the Olympics. Given that NBC’s coverage choices made it impossible for me to watch in a way that was acceptable to me, I preferred not to watch at all. I was so angry that the mere thought of the Olympics filled me with disgust.
The following day, I woke up feeling like someone was hammering an ice pick into my forehead. It was the worst pain I have ever experienced. Not only was I completely unable to function, but merely existing was agony. The pain made it impossible to sleep, and neither Tylenol nor aspirin did anything to relieve it. The only activity that was possible for me to do was lying in bed in excruciating pain. The entire day was essentially lost. Watching the Olympics, even if I had changed my mind and decided to do so after all, was impossible.
But as night fell, the agony finally abated. I realized that the Olympics primetime show was starting soon. And I decided to put it on. Watching the abridged versions of the day’s competitions, knowing that I had missed out on the full, live versions, was a foreign and bizarre experience for me. It was simultaneously torturous and interesting and enjoyable at the same time.
When the broadcast ended, I pulled up the TV listings for the following day. The feelings of overwhelm and frustration started to return. Gymnastics and equestrian were again slated for 4:00 in the morning, followed shortly thereafter by swimming and then archery and then more swimming. I could set my alarm for 6:00 and miss only one session of gymnastics qualifying, I thought to myself. I could set it for 8:00 and miss two sessions but at least catch archery. Or I could set it for 10:15 to ensure that I at least woke up in time for the second session of swimming. I went to bed feeling unsettled, but not nearly as out-of-control as I had felt the night before.
Miraculously, I woke up, without having set an alarm, at 7:30. Turning on the TV mid-competition, and therefore missing the beginning, is completely at odds with the way that my brain works, but that is exactly what I did. With the early morning sun casting beams of light across my living room, I watched the heats of the men’s individual medley and heard the crowd’s chanting for Leon Marchand reverberate through the stadium. Over the next few hours, I flipped back and forth between channels, catching portions of swimming, gymnastics, archery, equestrian, shooting, basketball, canoe slalom, and skateboarding.
It was painful to watch the third subdivision of women’s gymnastics qualifications, knowing that I had missed the first two, and it was similarly torturous to watch the cross-country equestrian competition, knowing that I had missed the dressage round in which a competitor had set a record for the best-ever score. But I enjoyed getting to experience a variety of different sports, and getting to watch them live, at the time that they were actually unfolding. I enjoyed switching from channel to channel to check out what was happening. I enjoyed watching gymnasts of all different countries, some of whom I’m not familiar with, and some of whom I recognized because they competed in the NCAA. I liked the introductory video to the equestrian competition, which explained the scoring system. I enjoyed the fencing competition, held in the magnificent, theater-like venue called the Grand Palais. And I even enjoyed catching a few minutes of skateboarding and basketball, even though these are not sports that I’m usually super interested in.
It turns out that losing an entire day, although excruciating in terms of both the physical pain and the sports missed, was necessary. The way that I had been approaching things was not working, and my body and brain forced me to stop. Losing an entire day allowed me to reset, to approach the Olympics with a completely different attitude, and to rediscover what had made sports my special interest in the first place.
Because in addition to the fact that they have systems and rules, I love sports because they make me feel connected to the world around me. I love to watch competitions unfold in real time, knowing that others all over the world are watching them as well. I love that no one knows what the outcome is going to be, and that everyone simultaneously finds out the result in real time. It makes me happy to know that I am watching sports together with millions of people, even though I don’t know them and am not interacting with them
With previous Olympics, I watched as many live sports as humanly possible, and I recorded the rest. Inevitably, the recordings would pile up to a point where I felt that I had no choice but to stay up late trying to get them watched. Inevitably, the second round of a competition would come on before I had a chance to watch the recording of the first round, and I would have to either watch the rounds out of order, or record the second round too. Inevitably, I would begin to cram in a few minutes of recordings here and there whenever I had a spare moment, causing me to miss the beginnings of live competitions when they invariably started earlier than I expected, and also causing me to miss out on the experience of watching Olympic sports that I wouldn’t necessarily have sought out. In general, this way of watching the Olympics created a jumbled, chaotic sports mess that was no longer enjoyable. The sports had gradually transformed over the years, from something fun into something that needed to get watched, a task that had to get done, an item on my to-do list that I aimed to get rid of as quickly as possible. Paradoxically, as I became more and more into sports, the thing that made me enjoy sports in the first place, had been lost.
Over the past couple of weeks, I have been getting up at a reasonable hour and simply watching whichever sports I can, while forcing myself to be okay with missing the rest. Watching the Olympics with this new philosophy has been simultaneously agonizing and exhilarating. Doing anything in a way that falls short of perfection is completely at odds with the way that my brain works. It is a situation in which no option feels right, but I feel that this one is better than the alternatives of either missing out on the Games entirely, or completely destroying both my sleep schedule and my brain in a futile attempt to catch everything. I am proud of myself for being able to adopt this new approach, because I know that the past version of me wouldn’t be able to do so. I am not an Olympic athlete, but in a way, I am doing the impossible every day of these Olympics, and I think that is pretty impressive.
