Can the Olympics withstand the heat?

Perhaps every athlete secretly left for the Tokyo Olympics, worried that they weren’t prepared enough for the challenge. I know I did. Does the 13-hour time difference affect performance? Could I handle long hours in front of the screen while juggling beer and ice cream?

Fortunately, my months of indoor pandemic training, Ted Lasso, The Last Dance, Sunderland Til I Die, paid off. The prizes of the last two weeks have been countless, delightful and often amazing. Britains Charlotte Worthington lowers the 360-degree rear tip to Win a Women’s Freestyle BMX | Carissa Moore of Hawaii won her first-ever gold medal in women’s surfing. Those superior high jumpers. Katie Ledecky. Allyson Felix.

For all other organisms on Earth, competition is definitely Malthus ’thing: to hunt, hide, grow, spawn, repeat. During evolution, this tension has led to miraculous morphological adaptations. Velvet worms. Ultraviolet flying squirrels. Electroactive bacteria. Sea fish and their living boyfriends.

Humans may be the first species for which such competition has ceased to be relevant. (Of course, only the species that has disproportionately large cortex would dare to think so.) So we came up with the Olympics, a performance about driving man at its purest and narrowest. Canoe sledding. Hammer throw. Trampoline gymnastics. Table tennis. There’s also meta-competition: new sports are rising, more boring (croquet, anyone?) Extinction.

It is fair to ask whether such a species could design and television an even nobler competitive output. What if states compete for the best programs to reduce maternal mortality? author Joyce Hackett wondered on Facebook. Competitive literacy! The countries with the most new readers make it to the finals, and then previously illiterate citizens declare their country great poets for victory.

In less than a year, we developed one, but several vaccines against the deadliest virus of the century at a record pace. But they still struggled to get enough people to take them, even though the virus develops new variants of itself in Alpha, Beta, Delta as if because of its own Greek competition. Let’s say they were made with an old school competition, but it’s not done for us.

Some observers are already wondering whether the Olympics have been successful as a company. Tokyo’s extreme heat and humidity has punished climbers, swimmers, runners and tennis players. (The Belgiums field hockey team prepared for the conditions by training in a thermal chamber, and the Olympic marathon will be held 500 cooler miles away.) A study in the Lancet in 2016 found that global warming will severely limit the organization of future summer games. Winter athletes are less and less able to train. Our competitiveness may take us out of the competitive business literally and figuratively.

This makes watching confusing, not to mention the confusing living experience on earth. How do we feel when the wonders of the world of human sports and nature are starting to dry up? Maybe a marble race. Kitchen athletics. No doubt one way or another, for better or worse, has always been curling.