I Was Wrong About the Olympics

The forces that often fuel division can foster unity.

Thursday night in Paris, I took two of our kids to our first Olympic basketball game. Something stunned me more than seeing Team USA fall 17 points behind Serbia. The moment an American player touched the ball, the arena erupted in unison: “BOOOOOOOOO!”

Booing athletes goes against the spirit of the games. The mission of the Olympics is more than elevating excellence—it’s to promote solidarity between people and peace between countries through a shared love of sports. Yet research reveals that during the Olympics, people actually become more hostile toward other countries. It happened in Beijing in 2008 and again in Rio in 2016.

It’s been called the Olympic paradox. Elite competition activates national pride… and international animosity. I assumed that’s what I was seeing in Paris. But I was wrong.

As the basketball game unfolded, it became clear that European fans weren’t booing Team USA. They were booing Joel Embiid for choosing to play for America instead of France after being becoming a citizen of both countries. It wasn’t general disdain—it was a specific beef.

The global crowd was surprisingly supportive of American players. I watched French fans cheer for Steph Curry as he faked out defenders and drained nine 3-pointers. I heard Europeans celebrate LeBron James as he racked up a triple double. I even saw some of them rise to their feet and applaud Team USA’s epic comeback win.

The esprit de corps across borders wasn’t limited to basketball. At the pool, it wasn’t just Americans and Mexicans rooting for Alison Gibson and Aranza Vazquez after each failed a dive—the entire crowd cheered them on to bounce back in the next round. At the track and field stadium, when high jumpers Anna Hall and Nafissatou Thiam faced the crowd and started clapping above their heads, we joined in to pump them up along with 80,000 fans from around the world.

The sociologist Emile Durkheim called it collective effervescence. It’s the joie de vivre of joining a group for a common purpose. In a divided world, it felt like we were united around a passion for witnessing great things.

It wasn’t just fans—even some rival athletes supported one another. That sportsmanship was visible in the gymnastics floor medal ceremony, when Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles bowed down from their American silver and bronze perches to honor Rebeca Andrade’s Brazilian gold. It’s becoming a pattern: in Rio, American and New Zealand women helped one another to the finish line after falling in a race, and in Tokyo, Qatari and Italian high jumpers agreed to share the gold medal.

I’ve interviewed top rivals who train together in Norwegian skiing and American running, but they share a country. The ethos of friendly competition at the Olympics goes further: you root for your team without rooting against your opponents. If it can happen in the zero-sum world of sports—where winning requires someone else to lose—it can happen anywhere.

As historian Yuval Noah Harari put it to me, there’s a fundamental difference between positive patriotism and negative nationalism. Positive patriotism is taking pride in your country. Negative nationalism is looking down on other countries.

The lesson here is that ingroup solidarity doesn’t require outgroup prejudice. Nowhere is that clearer than in basketball. In Paris, true devotees didn’t just cheer for their country—they also celebrated their favorite players. There’s nothing more Olympic than seeing a Spurs fan applauding both Team USA and their French star Victor Wembanyama.

If you zoom out far enough, it becomes obvious that national borders are a human invention. Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell captured it best: “From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a b****.’”

I used to think the ideal state of the world was striving to transcend borders altogether. The Olympics reminded me that rejecting negative nationalism doesn’t require us to abandon positive patriotism. You can love your people without hating others.