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Guest column: Olympics, like Canada — flaws and all — prove effort has value

In a world sliding toward authoritarian rule, the Olympics send a message there's still hope, and the world is at its best when we build it together, even in respectful competition,

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Every few years, the Olympics arrive like an interruption we did not ask for but secretly need.

They come to us at a time of political, moral and civic exhaustion. A time when democracy feels brittle, when public language has hardened into slogans, and when power increasingly belongs to people who sneer at weakness, mock cooperation, and promise greatness through domination.

These are the years when authoritarians flourish, when cruelty is packaged as strength, and when entire populations are taught to see one another not as neighbours but as threats.

It is precisely in such moments that the Olympics become dangerous to the wrong people.

Authoritarianism survives by shrinking the moral imagination. It reduces human beings to tools of the state or obstacles to be removed. It thrives on spectacle but fears empathy. It glorifies the nation while hollowing out the individual. It insists that history is made by force, not by restraint, and that dignity flows downward from power rather than upward from shared humanity.

The Olympics, for all their compromises and hypocrisies, tell a different story. You cannot watch an athlete falter, recover, and finish without being reminded that human worth is not determined by conquest. You cannot watch competitors embrace after a race without seeing how thin the line of permanent enmity really is.

These moments do not erase injustice or absolve regimes, but they reveal what propaganda works so hard to conceal: that people are more complex, more decent, and more alike than the systems governing them allow.

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The Olympics show us loss up close, tears and all. They dignify effort that does not end in gold. They insist that losing does not erase a person’s value. It’s a radical message in an age when losing elections is treated as treason and compromise is seen as betrayal.

This is why Canada and the Olympics somehow go together. Our uneasy and sometimes flawed shared project has been one of coexistence between languages, cultures, Indigenous nations and settlers, old arrivals and new.

We fail often, but it’s the aspiration itself that matters. We keep trying even if we don’t gain the podium. The Olympics remind us that difference need not collapse into chaos and that shared values can hold a diverse community together without demanding uniformity.

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The Olympic Games and Canada are what shared humanity looks like when it works, even with occasional failure. It is not sentimental. It is discipline with shared effort.

Authoritarians eventually discover that unrestrained force corrodes everything it touches. It turns nations into fortresses and citizens into forever soldiers. Authoritarians demand loyalty but offer no sense of belonging.

The Olympics, by contrast, create a fleeting but real moral commons. Attention shifts from outrage to effort, from public fury to quiet excellence. It’s hardly escapism but, instead, a kind of shared moral recovery. Nations learn the joy of shared humanity with shared standards.

In a world sliding toward authoritarian rule, it is good to be reminded that humanity isn’t at its best when it dominates but when it strives together in a shared sense of rules. It is a spirit still alive in this world, revealing itself by booing a rampant autocrat in the stands while wildly cheering Ukrainian athletes upon their arrival on the field.

For a brief stretch of days and nights we are reminded of this, even though the authoritarians prefer we aren’t. There is still hope in this world, and it is at its best when we build it together, even in respectful competition.

Glen Pearson is London Food Bank co-director and former Liberal MP for London North Centre. glen@glenpearson.ca

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