That famous Earl Warren quote - "I always turn to the sports pages first, which records people's accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man's failures" - that sportswriters use to justify their existence has taken a battering during these Olympics.
But beneath the malodorous layers of mendacity and malfeasance that the IOC facilitate, lie symbols of the founding Olympic ideal: men and women who prove that the Olympics are something worth fighting for.
On the opening weekend of the Olympics, Irish gymnast Kieran Behan dislocated his knee during his first tumble while fulfilling his floor routine. He completed the apparatus regardless, leaving the arena in a wheelchair.
After his first tumble, he paused momentarily, before continuing, shifting his weight to his right-hand side to best survive. He's not entirely sure how he did it:
I don't know.
Somehow I just went into survival mode and got myself through my routine. I didn't know what I scored when I'd finished because I felt my knee lock when I'd ended the routine. The fighter in me switched on and said "let's go, just don't stop". When I landed the dismount and the adrenalin wore off and I felt my knee I was just thinking 'oh, oh no'.
But I just don't know. My coach said afterwards that "you just completed the Olympic games, and technically you didn't fall and on you first tumble you injured your knee". So it's just...I don't know how I did it.
Time, says Behan, was out of joint. It seemed to slow down as he sustained the injury, before speeding up as he rushed through the rest of the routine before the pain became too much.
In the flaming heart of those Olympic instants, Behan's better nature of survival took over. For most Olympic athletes, their successes are the moments at which years of hard work, graft and training coalesce, becoming manifest in aspects technical and aerobic. On the Olympic floor, however, Behan's past experience crystallized in dazzling intangibles: bravery, strength, sheer bloody will. Hence why he's not sure how he was able to survive: this determination is so deeply set as to be instinctive.
Pain is a concept that has to be learned by the human body, so it is possible to think at a distance that pain was a sensation Behan just didn't bother with.
In reality, Behan has known extraordinary pain from an early age, but has always felt there were things in life more important.
When he was 10, Behan discovered a lump in his leg during training. Hours later he lay on an operating table in a bid to remove what was determined to be a tumor. Complications in the surgery meant Behan awoke in excruciating agony: the tourniquet applied to his leg was not removed through the surgery, leading to serious nerve damage. Doctors told him he would never walk again.
Behan evidently disagreed: he was back walking - and training - within two years. It was not long upon his return, however, that Behan sustained a second hideous injury.
Warming up on a high bar, he slipped, thudding the back of his head off the bar. He was rushed to hospital, where his head remained strapped to the bed for a week until the swelling to his head subsided. Behan had shattered his vestibular canal, the part of the brain which detects rotary movements and facilitates balance. The injury essentially meant Behan had to re-learn every basic human movement, at an agonizingly slow rate.
When he first opened his eyes, he immediately went into spasms and lost consciousness. It took weeks before he was ready to sit upright, and another number of weeks before he was capable of moving his head.
For the second time in his thirteen years of life, Behan was told he would never walk again. This time, he was told alone by a child psychologist, as doctors were unsure whether the recently-injured brain was capable of even processing this information. They underestimated him. This is how his mother Bernie remembers the day:
Kieran told the psychiatrist 'I hit the back of my head. There's nothing wrong with the front of my head' and he pointed to the brain. He said 'there's nothing wrong with this'. Then the psychiatrist comes out, and Kieran is wheeled out after him.
The psychiatrist came to me and said that 'there's nothing wrong with that fella'.
Very few people could tell there was anything wrong with 'that fella' after his first tumble on the floor exercise in Rio. Behan admits his coach knew straight away, but from the perspective of the viewer, it seemed as if Behan had injured himself while landing his final flip.
After the routine, the main sensation that grasped Behan was the pain of his knee, but it was also exacerbated with disappointment: "I was absolutely gutted. I knew what the scores were, and I knew the scores I was capable of...it was pure bad luck. All the hard work had gone away... it was strange. I was taken out of the arena, I had huge applause, and when you're underground, and you can still hear the crowd cheering in the distance...it's strange, it's alien".
Behan is among the most unassuming people in Irish sport, speaking with shock of the reception he has received since his performance. His first words to his coach were "are you proud of me? Did I let anyone down, do you think?", and the perspective afforded by reading about himself has blown him away. What was instinctive in the arena has proved emotional in the aftermath. One of these pieces included an interview with his mother that appeared on this website.
Once we finally got back to the Village, and got a bit of WiFi, I began to see all the reaction. I was sitting clicking 'refresh', 'refresh' 'refresh'.
While I'd gone through it, I also felt like an outsider looking in.
I was blown away by it. Tears were welling up when I read it. When you're at home, you don't go into much detail on it. It's like when someone passes away, you don't go into great detail on it. It was only last Christmas I went into detail with my dad about what happened. We had a man-to-man conversation, a father-son conversation, and to hear his perspective on what happened...
For all this time, I thought I was conscious the whole time [going to hospital after the brain injury]. I thought I was ok, when I was on the way to the hospital. When he handed me over, he said I wasn't sure if you were going to survive. To listen to that as an adult, and hear my father talk about what it was like for him... it was like...[exhales].
Behan has hung around the Olympic Village since his injury, and has got involved wth cheering on all of the Irish athletes. He describes the ethos within the Irish team as "extraordinary", and while the O'Donovan brothers have been rightly hailed for their medal exploits, Behan says that the reaction he has received has tempered any disappointment he could have felt after the injury:
I feel like I've won a medal. It puts in perpective, my journey. I'm just totally blown away by it. It's really taken me back. If the best thing I've done is show fight and show my character, and if people can take inspiration from and I can give them hope, for me that's like having a medal around my neck.
Kieran Behan is a survivor, and with him, the Olympic ideal survives.
Kieran Behan is an ambassador for Samsung.
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