There have never been so many glorious geeks gathered in one place as there are at the 2024 Olympics, unless you want to count heads at a soil dynamics convention. What sweetness comes from total absorption in an eccentric pursuit – and what surprising athletic confidence, judging by the performances of the Gabby Thomases, Grant Fishers and Stephen Nedorosciks, not to mention all the throwers, fencers, shooters and archers. If there’s a main lesson of these Paris Games, it’s this: Make fun of the eyeglassed kids who draw strange schematics in their high school notebooks if you wish, but what they do as adolescents is likely to be the least of what they accomplish, while the mockers peak in 11th grade.
Thomas, the commanding gold medalist in the women’s 200 meters, is Harvard-educated in neurobiology with a master’s degree in public health and a special interest in the epidemiology of sleep. A few years ago, when she tired of the dual stress of training and making grades, she took two months off – for a field-study trip to Senegal. She called it “refreshing.
” That’s geekdom. Fisher, only the fourth American man to medal in the 10,000 meters, is a Stanford grad in electrical engineering with a master’s in computer science. When he is asked to name a hobby, he lists computer programming and piano.
His true love apart from running is computational social science, the use of data “to predict various things in the world.” He told Track and Field News, “It’s been fun.” Yared Nuguse, the surprise American bronze medalist in the 1,500 meters with the magnificent kick, is arguably the most unapologetic geek in the Games.
He was on the bowling team in high school. He got his degree in biochemistry from Notre Dame and insists running is merely a secondary interest to his life’s ambition of becoming an orthodontist. In his spare time, he likes to sketch insects with charcoal pencils.
Then, of course, there’s Nedoroscik, the bespectacled pommel horse bronze medalist who rested his mind for competition by solving a Rubik’s Cube in less than 10 seconds. What with his degree in electrical engineering from Penn State, he thinks of his sport in terms of “negative momentum and positive momentum” and says of his event specialty, “a lot of horse specialists, you’ll see, are engineers or, you know, really smart people. They’re just kind of nerds – and, honestly, kind of geeky people.
They’re all just kind of fun.” The U.S.
fencing team is studded with geeks, including three-time gold medalist Lee Kiefer, who is on leave from medical school and works as a reproductive rights advocate, and Harvard economics grad Elizabeth Tartakovsky. Fencing is often called chess with swords. “You have to use your brain and think very hard and think independently on the strip .
.. and I think a lot of that translates,” Tartakovsky says.
There is something more going on here than just the notion that athletics is a brand of intelligence, though it certainly is. What does it mean to be a geek? It’s not a look or an interest in robotics. A geek is someone who finds an obsessive interest that most others don’t share and decides to pursue it intelligently, regardless of popularity.
Road cycling gold medalist Kristen Faulkner is pure geek. A rower as an undergrad at Harvard, she left Cambridge with a degree in computer science, as well as proficiency in Mandarin and Spanish, and went into venture capital, investing in early-stage technology companies. She only discovered cycling in 2017 – that was the first time she ever clicked into some pedals – and found that all of her previous obsessions applied.
“What I learned was how to calculate high risks and how to assess risk,” she said after upsetting some of the best cyclists in the world with a sustained breakaway. “..
. But there’s also being an athlete – there’s the discipline, the time management, the resilience, learning how to learn.” What Faulkner is saying is that geeks have the gift of method.
They have a tolerance for tedium and a penchant for process, a deep attentiveness that makes them suited for athletic training. They have organization. Maybe most importantly, they have the resilient minds of researchers and engineers when it comes to failure.
They know you can only improve something by stressing it. Listen to Valarie Allman, the two-time gold medalist in the discus who got her Stanford degree in product design, talk about the development of her high athletic functionality. “For most people at this level, the psychology part is most of the battle,” she said.
“...
So much of what you do is routine and discipline and structure, and you get so much experience doing the same movement, a second-and-a-half, thousands of times throughout the year. Being able to walk into your area of play and know your body is going to do exactly what you want it to, that’s the challenge.” Former New York Yankees performance coach Dana Cavalea, who worked with Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera among others, has talked about how the disciplined math of training, the seeking of infinitesimal fractions of difference, is what separates the highest performers.
In other words, their geekdom. So many of us, average people, stroll through the world hoping to project nonchalance because we suppose it means effortlessness – when, really, it’s a kind of abdication. That way, we never really have to lose at anything.
Geekdom “comes with friction,” Cavalea observes, because it means “you have to start making choices.” To resist the pressure of the crowd, forgo a social drink, not partake of the group dessert, be called a stiff. It means rejection – a decision not to do what everyone else is doing.
Therein lies the true beauty of the geek. Beware the child curled over a glue model as others play video games, the teenager with a pencil and a journal, the collegian alone in a dorm deserted for a kegger. Geeks find enthusiasm where others see boredom.
They are the ones with true imagination – and big futures. Modify your screen name Please sign into your Sun Journal account to participate in conversations below. If you do not have an account, you can register or subscribe .
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