Talking about performance at the Olympics means, more often than at any other competition, talking about excellence. This term refers to rare, unusual, and difficult-to-repeat performances.
In an age of rampant narcissism, where many seek originality by disguising it as creativity and personal uniqueness, the Olympics confront us with the reality of truly exceptional performances that only a few manage to express in this competition involving the best athletes in the world.
I would like to focus on this idea: among all participants, just over 10% will win a medal, and of these, about 3% win gold. Excellence is a rarity, but in daily life, this term is almost always used for much inferior human performances.
It would be appropriate for the word excellent to be used in everyday life for activities and performances that truly are excellent, not just fairly good, good, or even very good.
Unfortunately, this will not be the case, as social media rewards those who manage to reach more people, thus popularity, rather than the content of the performance.
So let us be content with this event that occurs once every four years, which reorders the value of the quality of execution (the content) and not the popularity of the protagonists.