Pass olympically

Athlete Simone Biles with her bronze medal.MIKE BLAKE / Reuters

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• Simone Biles, the woman who has changed everything

Every four years, the gigantic Zeus who crowned the sanctuary dedicated to him with his 12 meters of ivory and gold, received the participants of the Olympic Games in Ancient Greece. This Zeus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, witnessed the oath by which athletes pledged to compete with sportsmanship. The town of Olympia became the headquarters of this religious celebration that sought to strengthen ties and promote harmony between peoples and citizens. The event was so important that the

Greek

enacted a truce. The Olympic peace began earlier and ended several days after the competition. The goal: for the athletes to arrive safely at their destination of glory and return home with the same security.

After 12 centuries, the ban on pagan celebrations of Christianity ended the Games. Fifteen hundred years later, Pierre de Coubertin recovered the Olympic festival with a speech that interwoven the word sport with the concepts of peace, understanding, union ... In 1896 Athens was the site of the first Olympic Games of the modern era. The Olympic torch was coming home.

Since then, the competition has given us much more than just a magnificent sporting event. The mass media brought the competition closer to the general public and made it possible to record moments full of symbolism and historical relevance. The 1936 Games, for example, conceived as a display of Nazism's racial and political superiority, gave us the image of Jesse Owens winning four golds and demolishing the theory of white supremacy with a medal. The logo of the five rings, representing the five interlocking continents, has become a symbol of peace and one of the most recognized emblems. The cooperation between the IOC and the UN has influenced the role of sport as an instrument of dialogue and reconciliation, proposing to recover the Olympic truce of the classical period.

With television at home, the Games became the occasion to learn about minority sports. To enjoy beauty, effort and dedication. To comment on the plays and the medals as a family, among friends. To get excited about victories and defeats. And, above all, to accumulate moving, generous and supportive gestures in the retina and in the memory. It's hard to forget scenes like the hug from Nikki Hamblin and Abbey D'Agostino after tripping, falling and helping each other in the 5,000-meter semifinals of Rio 2016. Or the applause from the audience that carried Guinean swimmer Eric Moussambani in Sydney 2000.

Tokyo 2020 says goodbye after leaving us their images for the library of emotions: Nijel Amos and Isaiah Jewett crossing the finish line together after their fall, the embrace of Yulimar Rojas and Ana Peleteiro, the shared gold of Mutaz Essa Barshim and Gianmarco Tamberi, the fortress by Simone Biles ... But in the era of the permanently angry offended, suddenly this is also an affront against which you have to type very hard on Twitter, lest the medals lose their shine and there is a drop in aggressiveness that cause world chaos. And as they are trying with everything lately, sport and its good teachings become a doll to hit and the Olympic Games, in the umpteenth cultural battlefield. As if solidarity were not Olympic.

Fortunately, life lives out of the bile of the nets and the murmur on the terraces rejoices at Biles's bronze and gets emotional with those who see themselves as companions and not rivals. Friends forever, which said the motto of Barcelona 92. United by emotion, that of Tokyo 2020. The best thing when the toxic cloud arrives with its noise is to pass through the Olympics, not be distracted and continue applauding life.