I had an Olympic dream. I started swimming when I was four years old, but didn’t start taking it seriously until I was twelve years old (which is quite late in swimming years), though my career stretched onto a Division 1 collegiate team an achievement in itself, my career ending in injury. To dream to be an Olympian is something you hold inside yourself day in and day out. And this is not something I have ever truly shared widely. I was never an out athlete until I moved to open water swimming and triathlon, as hobbies in my mid-20s. Even today, there are few openly gay male swimmers in collegiate swimming, let alone the National Team. In spite of my own identity confusion and desire to conform, the Olympic swimming dream was real for me and stayed with me during those formative years. The Olympic journey, contrary to NBC’s propaganda, can be quite a lonely experience. I was inspired by last night’s coverage of Simone Biles exit from team competition and Michael Phelps speaking candidly about his own personal struggles of mental health. “The Greatest” are also human, too. It was validating and inspiring. The discourse will only broaden around athletes choosing vulnerability instead of being stoic pillars of achievement. Instead they can be considered feats of strength and self-awareness. Nonetheless, the Olympic dream propels you to put your body through intense pain and push your body harder than you can even imagine. 

Often, we separate sport and culture language in the United States. It seems in most other countries, sport is part of their heritage and cultural pride, and their everyday language reflect this interconnectedness. My passion for art and sport one and the same. Over the last few weeks, I have thought about my first tattoo I got when I turned 18 on the inside lower left ankle. The tattoo is the 1996 Olympic swimming pictogram designed by Malcom Grear Designers, a Rhode Island-based design firm. This was the first time the pictogram took a more humanized look, as you can see from the nose and the flip of the hand coming out of the water. They were all black against an orange background when first released, but like most solid black design, they were versatile. The sport illustration/pictogram has a history going back to 1912 Stockholm Games, but truly took hold with the 1964 Tokyo Games, where the Japanese perfected them using them not only as monikers, but for way finding. And I could wax philosophical on the 1968 Mexico City game design as some of the greatest graphic design in history (see Mexico 68: Design and Dissent for reference). Yet, the designs hold weight well beyond their siloed role of communicating sport, they hold the weight of a host nation. At ten years old, I decided I would get it tattooed when I went to the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996 and saw the pictogram blown up on a venue walkway en route to a handball game. It took me eight years to finally mark my body in a strategic place. Every time I took to the blocks and bent to down to clinch the block, the pictogram was there on the inside of my left ankle, as a reminder of the dream, the propulsion and speed needed to compete. 

I learned about the pictogram through a project my brother Paul began early in his teenage years. He followed the Olympic Games closely, collected USA Today editions and the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch daily during the games tracking each sport and every country. He created his own archive of what we witnessed through the television set. I would put his talent up against any scrapebook hobbists, as they seem to me, binders of gold. I remember the slim three ring binder with the ice blue logo of the 1988 Albertville Winter Olympics shaded in with color pencil. And the giant four-ring binder of the 1992 Barcelona Summer Games. This is where my appreciation for the weight of a pencil began. I remember trying out different types of graphite for shading and texture. I never quite was able to copy him as perfectly as desired, but I continued through all the way to my high school summer when I had friends on the 2004 Athens Olympic Team. Swimming is a small community. We are always one-degree of separation from a National Team member. And my closest claim to fame was that I swam against Michael Phelps in Memphis, TN months before he made his first Olympic Team at the age of 15 in 2000.

I am grateful to those early days of opening the newspaper, tracking the sports I had never heard of, let alone countries I could never place on the globe. My museological and art collection pursuits stem from watching my brother draw, gather, curate, and dedicate time to this Olympic ephemera archive. It was a collection of so many things I still love: archives, newspapers, paper, pencils, sport, and culture. And after the years, when I hear the trumpets of John William’s Olympic Fanfare blare through the TV, I summon the words of Pierre de Coubertin and remind myself that “The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part; the essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.” 

And every time, without fail, when those Olympic swimmers step up on the block, I am reminded of ten-year old Gregory dreaming big. Though my reality of becoming an Olympian gets slimmer and slimmer as my body ages, the potential for new dreams only widens. My Olympic spirit persists like my hands still cut through the water, as my arms bend and reach for the fresh water ahead, staying true to the black line beneath me. Even amid the seemingly insurmountable corporate greed, wasted resources, and division our world is facing. I am not striving for ignorance here. We need to adapt. Yet, I have that dream in me still in many ways. And like my tattoo, very much like my dream, I hope it never goes away.

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