Those anxious weeks and months leading up to the Pyeongchang Olympics seem so long ago, now. With the games themselves just recently in the past, it’s easy to forget the questions that so defined those days. In bars and around water coolers, out loud to friends and family and in an echoing loop in our minds, America wondered—is the Olympics something that many people are saying is really doing more and more? No one knew, and so you heard people saying, so many times and so much—is it going to be not good and maybe some say even one of the humiliating and very embarrassment causing failures not just in sports but for everyone, and also even the whole world? Even in the moment, amid the thrill and thrum of the games themselves, the questions lingered—are we gonna do a really beautiful games with such amazing energy and so strongly?
As we look back at the games, now both dwindling and somehow undiminished behind us, we can now do so with the knowledge that these questions have been answered. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump spoke eloquently on the feeling, which is maybe even more of a movement, that you hear so many sharing where the Olympics are concerned:
Here, if you don’t feel like listening to the most powerful man on earth almost fall asleep, is a transcript of what Trump said about the Winter Games in Pyeongchang on Tuesday.
I will say this, and we’ve been given tremendous credit because the Olympics was not going well, and when they came in, out of the blue, and they said, “We’d love to participate in the Olympics,” it made the Olympics very successful. President Moon of South Korea was very generous in his statement, as to the fact that we had a lot to do with that, if not everything. We had a lot to do with it. The Olympics were beautiful. They were really very successful. And as you know they weren’t looking that way prior to. So I thought North Korea was terrific. They came out. They went into the Olympics. They went in with good spirit. They did well. It’s, let’s see if we can carry it over. We may carry it over, we may not. It’s a very tenuous situation. It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens.
As we look back on these games, this is definitely something to keep in mind.