CLASS

We have always watched the Olympics in muted admiration, even awe, of our athletes' physical gifts. And almost all of us understand that these wondrous specimens worked awfully hard--harder than most of us ever have--to achieve a spot on an Olympic team. But how many times have we watched their behavior on this most visible stage and said, "I'd never behave like that?"

Too many.

But, with very rare exceptions, not here in Beijing.

It all began last Sunday when the U.S. men's volleyball team, just hours after the father-in-law of head coach Hugh McCutcheon had been senselessly murdered, went out and beat Venezuela. That quiet resolve has extended all week, as the U.S. men are now 4-0, a record that few expected them to have.

Also on that day Jason Kidd, the wealthiest (by salary) athlete at these Games, made it over to the beach volleyball venue to watch Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh play. This despite the fact that Kidd's own team had a fairly important game that evening versus China. One week later Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and the rest of the Redeem Team were at the Water Cube to cheer Michael Phelps on to his record-breaking eighth gold medal.

It makes you wonder why anyone ever thought they were too cool to be part of the Olympics.

Whether or not there was an actual memo sent out, American athletes seem to have gotten it here in Beijing.

 Gymnast David Durante is passed over as an alternate not once but twice--of the nine males on the U.S. men's gymnastics team, six full members and three alternates, Durante is the only one who never got to suit up--.but he still shows up for his friends' competition and cheers them on to a bronze medal. And Durante was not even allowed on the floor, in fact, had to find his own way into the gym. But Durante, who has the build of a male college cheerleader, was his team's most vocal cheerleader.

The diva rivalry that so many people tried to lather up between American female gymnasts Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson never quite frothed. Instead, the two roomed together and finished gold-silver, respectively, in the women's individual all-around. Asked to assess what happened afterward, Johnson simply said that Liukin performed better than she had.

Two days earlier, when their teammate, Alicia Sacramone, made two costly errors in the team competition, sideline reporter Andrea Joyce offered solace by saying it was a team failure. Sacramone, living some of the most painful minutes of her life in front of our entire nation, gamely noted that she was the only person on the balance beam when she fell off it. She was accountable.

Moments such as that have been plentiful here in Beijing.  

Sprinter Tyson Gay, heavily favored to medal in the men's 100, fails to even make the final. An incredibly painful, perhaps even embarrassing, moment for Gay. And yet when NBC's Bob Neumeier interviewed him moments later, Gay said simply, "No excuses. They were better than me tonight."

Shooter Matt Emmons, quite unbelievably, let gold slip through his fingers on his 10th and final shot for the second Olympics in a row. In Athens he'd shot at the wrong target and finished 8th. Today in Beijing the gun went off accidentally on his final shot and Emmons went from gold to fourth, out of the medals. "There are other things way more important," sounds Emmons, who got a lovely bride out of his Athens misfortune. "I'm waiting for some really good thing to happen from this, because everything happens for a reason."

Dara Torres delays the semifinal of the 50 free so that another swimmer--not an American, but an Aussie-- will have time to change out of her torn swimsuit and not be disqualified. Two days later in the final Torres, in her final bid to at last win individual gold in a career that has spanned five Olympics, comes up .01 second short. And she smiles, as if to say, "God has a sense of humor."

Torres did not protest the results--as a Croatian swimmer who lost the 100 meter butterfly to Michael Phelps by the same infinitessimal margin had a day earlier. In fact, it was not an American who boasted that his relay team would "smash" another nation's, and then lost to that very nation in the pool (that was France). It was not an American who threw a tantrum on the medals stand and tossed his bronze to the floor (that was a Swede). It was not an American who "styled' in the final seven strides of his gold-medal winning 100-meter sprint and it wasn't an American (and let's hope it won't be) who tested positive for drugs. Not once in Beijing.

And then there's Michael Phelps. As monumental and miraculuous as his achievement in the pool has been, so has his demeanor every step of the way. Through nine days he exuded determination, discipline, focus, passion and humility. Phelps may not have the charisma of, say, Lopez Lomong--and what an inspired choice by the various US team captains he was to be the flag bearer-- but compare the way he carried himself to the way Bode Miller did two years earlier, when he completely whiffed on his five-gold quest in Torino.  

A day or two before the Opening Ceremony a few American cyclists got off the plane at Beijing's airport wearing breathing masks, an insult to host nation China. And more than a few of us thought, Here we go again (and to be fair to those athletes, they were only doing what the US Cycling delegation had told them to do; don't blame the athletes, blame the bureacrats). But that has been, from what I can assess, the last and only faux pas that this team has committed. You may point to Marta Karolyi's carping about the age of the female Chinese gymnasts, but then again she may have had a point.

Ugly Americans have seemed a vanishing breed here in Beijing, and that has been a welcome reprieve. And I realize that you, reader, have every right to judge the partiality of such a commentary being typed by an American writer who works for NBC, and I don't begrudge you that. So please judge for yourself.

For myself, though, I have witnessed daily here behavior that has made me far prouder to be an American than any medal count could. Here's hoping it continues.