Let’s say you learned to tell time on a simple, round analog clock, with 12 big numbers and two hands. The Olympic Games present a mind-bending puzzle: What if, between each of those big numbers, there were scores of smaller numbers? And what if, between the smaller numbers, there were hundreds more numbers?
That’s what clocks look like — what time looks like — to a lot of Olympic athletes, whose success or failure is defined by cruelly tiny increments. The American sprinter Noah Lyles won the men’s 100-meter dash by 0.005 of a second. If he had been slower by a blink of an eye, generally accepted to last one-tenth of a second, he would have finished seventh.
Speed, of course, is part of competing. We talk about the best times, the time to beat. But minutes contain an infinite number of fractions a human brain can struggle to comprehend.
Kenny Bednarek of the United States won a silver medal after running the 200 in 19.62 seconds; Letsile Tebogo of Botswana won gold by finishing 0.16 of a second faster.
Those hundredths of a second are truly microscopic, but they created a huge difference in the experience of the two men: Tebogo won his country’s first Olympic gold medal ever. Bednarek mulled what he could have done better.
“I know this is not my best race,” he said after “settling” for the silver medal. “At practice, I run way faster.”
By which he meant not very much faster at all, but then, time in Olympic competition is relative.
Some athletes will deny even paying attention to the clock, and it makes sense: They are not out there to ruminate on the vicissitudes of time. Their job is simply to get to the finish line before anyone else.
“I’m grateful for this time,” Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone of the United States said after running the 400 hurdles in 50.37 seconds, breaking a world record to win gold. For context, her time was only 0.2 seconds slower than the qualifying time required to run in the women’s 400 final without hurdles.
“It’s always, you know, go for the win,” she said. “Then you go for the time. The time will come. You can’t chase times all the time. You just gotta run the race itself.”
Yet chasing time is exactly what these people do, day in and day out. And the margins are startlingly small.
Quincy Hall of the United States, Matthew Hudson-Smith of Britain and Muzala Samukonga of Zambia all ran the 400 in 43 seconds, with just four hundredths of a second separating Hall’s gold-winning time from Hudson-Smith in second. Samukonga was third at just three tenths of a second behind Hudson-Smith.
The aquatic races were similar: The winner of the men’s 100 breaststroke, Nicolò Martinenghi of Italy, finished in 59.03 seconds. Adam Peaty of Britain and Nic Fink of the United States tied for silver, two hundredths of a second back. The fourth-place finisher swam 59.11.
“It could have gone another way,” Peaty said. “I could have gone 0.01 slower, could have been a bronze. I could have got fourth if I was just a fingernail behind that.”
Do all these numbers make your eyes glaze over? Are you as dazed as the math lady meme? How many hundredths of a second go by as you read these words?
Even athletes whose performance is not measured by a clock must contend with the tyranny of time. Think of the archers, the shot-putters, the table tennis players. They train for decades. As the Games approach, they endure weeks of preparation, days of travel, hours of warm-ups and anxious, fraught minutes before they step into the dazzling spotlight on the world stage, perhaps for the only time. The warmth and brightness, if they feel it at all, often lasts just a few seconds.
A regular rugby match lasts for a leisurely 80 minutes, split into two halves. At the Olympics, in rugby sevens, all of the tackles, tumbles and thrills are squeezed into two seven-minute intervals. Fourteen minutes. That’s what you get for your work.
In her gold-medal run, the Japanese skateboarder Coco Yoshizawa, 14, landed something called a bigspin kickflip frontside boardslide, among other tricks. The run lasted 45 seconds.
It’s common, as we age, to get the creeping sense that our best years are behind us. What if you felt, in middle school, that your best 45 seconds were behind you?
Then there’s the time you don’t see: Artistic swimmers spend eight hours a day treading water to train for competing in three-minute routines — and they spend almost half of those minutes holding their breath underwater.
And there’s lost time. For athletes, every second in competition represents a sacrificed outing with friends, a long car ride to a practice, a sleepless night, the healing of an injury. Athletes speak of missed birthdays and holidays spent in pursuit of personal bests.
Magda Skarbonkiewicz of the United States, an 18-year-old competing in her first Olympics, started fencing at 6. By high school, she was traveling so much that she had to switch to online school.
“My old school had a graduation and I went,” she said. “Everyone gets to walk the stage — and I’m watching my class graduate from the audience.”
She did not win any medals in Paris. “No regrets,” she wrote in a post on Instagram. “I didn’t come back with any hardware this time, but you know very well soon I’ll be back ready to fight ;)”
We’re always ready to fight time. We try to conquer it, to outwit and outrun it, to manipulate the idea of how much can be accomplished inside the seconds allotted.
And still, it slips away.
Only a few leave the Games with a tangible, shiny medal. But everyone takes away the thing that even the passing days cannot corrupt: An indelible memory of a defining time, however long it lasted.
Jenny Vrentas contributed reporting.