Goodwill should be universal

I’ve caught bits and pieces of the Olympics over the last couple of weeks. I’ll watch a few minutes of whatever event is on when I have a few minutes.
It’s interesting to me how good a job the announcers do making their viewers feel invested in competitors or events they may not have ever thought of before.
I caught the tail end of a high jump competition where a man from Italy and a man from Qatar were competing for gold. I’d never heard of either athlete before, but watching just that few minutes of their final events made me root for both of them.
In this case, everyone did get to win. They ultimately decided to share the gold medal after both flew past the next to last jump, but neither could clear the Olympic-record height of 7 feet, 10 inches.
It was Mutaz Barshim of Qatar who suggested they share the medal, rather than have a jump off, according to an article by Time magazine.
“For me, coming here, I know for a fact that for the performance I did, I deserve that gold,” Barshim told Time. “He did the same thing, so I know he deserved that gold.”
Gianmarco Tamberi of Italy suffered a broken ankle before the last Olympics. He brought the cast with him this month, scrawled across the ankle, “Road to Tokyo 2020” with 2020 crossed out and replaced by 2021.
“I still can’t believe it happened,” Tamberi told Time magazine. “Sharing with a friend is even more beautiful. … It was just magical.”
The friends had even speculated before the event, what if they could both win gold.
“This is beyond sport,” Barshim said in the article. “This is the message we deliver to the young generation.”
It’s an incredibly moving story.
And for all of those, there are also the athletes who put in the time, and who have shined over and over again at previous competitions and in practice, only to be derailed this month. A stumble, a glitch, a moment of distraction, and what could have been their best day turns into their worst day.
And that is true for all of us.
We can do something wonderfully 100 times, but there are always going to be those days when it just doesn’t work. There can be a hundred reasons. It might be factors outside our control, like someone else earlier in the line not putting the right parts together. Or it might be simple distraction at a critical moment on our part.
My point, I suppose, is that we shouldn’t reserve our goodwill for those times when we’re on top of the world, or when everything is working out perfectly for those we come in contact with.
The other moments, like not losing our cool when someone providing a service to us doesn’t do their job perfectly, are important as well. (Even if it feels like the three hours we’ve spent on hold, just to be disconnected are more than anyone should have to put up with. Especially since the next person who answers the phone probably has no control over the decisions that led to that moment.)
Donna Farley is the editor of the Daily American Republic. She can be reached at dfarley.dar@gmail.com.