On Dreams That Change Shape
Disclaimer and warning in one: this is different. And long. So get comfy. Don’t bring snacks. This is not a blog entry for snacks. More like bourbon.
Sooooo, I think it’s time to talk about the Olympics.
Yes, I know. The politics, the money, the corruption, the endless debates that surface every two to four years like clockwork. I’m aware. But strip all of that away and what you’re left with is something far better: emotion.
The Olympics is emotion. Don’t you think?
It is sacrifice with a pulse. It is discipline stretched so thin it almost snaps. It is humans deciding that fractions of seconds matter enough to shape an entire life around them. The Olympic thought travels through my head, shoulders, knees and toes. It sits under the skin — the fire, the tension, the years of saying no to everything so that one day, perhaps for a single moment, you get to say yes.
I’ve just been again, in Milano. And there is nothing like it. The air doesn’t just feel charged — it feels shared. Thousands of strangers inhaling together as one human, or a team, prepares to attempt something extraordinary. You can feel the collective heartbeat in your chest, even if you don’t know the rules of the sport. Even if you’ve never held the equipment. Even if you claim not to care.
Maybe astronauts feel something similar when they leave the atmosphere.
Have you ever watched athletes watch their own Olympic footage? Moments after. Years later. Decades later. The body changes. The hair greys. The emotion remains untouched. Because for them, that moment never really passed. The podium. The anthem. The flag rising slowly into a sky that suddenly felt very small.
And then I remember a conversation.
I walked with a friend by a lake somewhere in a forest so intensely green it felt almost unreal. He already knew he would never attend the Olympics as an athlete. He had done the reckoning and made his peace with it — the kind of peace that comes when you understand that life has other plans and you are not in charge of all of them.
Our conversation drifted to the elephant in the room: someone we both knew had been caught doping.
We struggled to understand it. Especially because the guy who had been caught said something that told me more than I ever wanted to know.
“The moment when you stand up there on the podium when you win is worth everything. Everything. I don’t care about the damage I cause to my body. Or my reputation afterwards. I just want to win.”
Winning above everything.
It didn’t shock me. It made me sick.
My friend and I kept walking, gravel shifting beneath our shoes, trying to understand what “everything” really meant. Because everything is not abstract. Everything has a cost.
It means standing there, celebrated and immortalised, while knowing the moment you’re living was meant for someone else.
When you’re caught, the second becomes the winner. Eventually. On paper. In statistics.
But the real tragedy is the fourth becoming third.
No anthem swelling in real time.
No stadium erupting in their name.
No medal placed around their neck while the world is watching.
Just a revised result weeks or months or years later. Maybe a ceremony, maybe not… A corrected headline.
They will never feel that explosion of sound when their name is called. They will never have the photograph taken in that exact second of disbelief and pride — the one you either frame in the centre of your living room or hide in a drawer because it is too much, too bright, too defining. That choice alone says something about who you are.
But they will never get the choice.
How do you stand there knowing you have stolen time?
He paused.
“But what if nobody finds out?” he said. And he winked.
It was such a small gesture. Casual. Almost playful.
It felt enormous.
Because if the podium is worth everything, integrity must be worth more.
And here is the part I never wanted to write about.
I was an Olympic hopeful too.
I don’t usually say that anymore, because that is not who I am now.
Except… it is.
Because some things never really leave you.
I am disciplined. I love movement. I used to be fiercely competitive, which I’m not anymore — at least according to my husband, who claims I now lack it to a mildly concerning degree, considering my history.
I grew up in a sporting family where the Olympic rings were not abstract symbols but part of the wallpaper. Five circles that meant structure, sacrifice, obsession.
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There was a time when those rings defined everything. I breathed Olympics. I ate Olympics. I trained like a good soldier preparing for a war no one else could see. From as far back as I can remember, I was certain I would go to the Winter Games for cross-country skiing. The 2010 Games would have been my first. I didn’t hope it. I knew it.
And then life happened.
I didn’t make it.
After that, I never touched my skis again.
But I kept them. They moved with me from place to place, sitting in cellars, collecting dust, as if waiting for permission neither of us knew how to give.
Then we were invited to Salt Lake City. The 2002 Games had been held there. I had only ever known it through stories –it is still my circle after all. So going there wasn’t neutral.
Something stirred within me.
I couldn’t quite name it, but it was there.
One day the boys went alpine skiing, and I realised I couldn’t face another cheerful ascent followed by polite zigzagging down the mountain. (Yes, you guessed correctly — alpine skiing and I have a complicated relationship.)
So I went somewhere on my own. The car seemed to know the way, almost instinctively following the road to the Olympic cross-country tracks of 2002.
I stood there, next to the ski rental hut, and waited.
And I breathed in snow again.
Like I had for so many years before. And then hadn’t. And now… here.
I borrowed the equipment. Put it on. Feeling something that hovered somewhere between nausea and pure sunlight.
I closed my eyes for one second. Then two. Then three. And let myself feel the tracks beneath me.
Just me. My headphones. Good old country music filling the quiet. I wasn’t ready to hear the snow. But I was alone, as if some higher power — or at least decent timing — knew I needed that.
I touched the tracks and… everything settled.
It was as if I was learning to walk again. Just by placing those long boards into the grooves. Poles in hand. Eyes still closed.
And then I opened them.
Slowly, the movement returned. Not clumsy. Not hesitant. As if I hadn’t done anything else in the past years. As if the body had simply been waiting for permission. Just deeply ingrained. Muscle memory never really forgets. My heart raced. My eyes watered — from the cold, yes, but also from the overwhelming realisation that I was back.
After a year in hospital fighting a brutal battle that cost me my dream, I was standing on skis again.
I was there.
I was okay.
I was actually bloody flying.
Later, we went to Whistler Mountain. To the track I would have raced in 2010, before hospital corridors replaced starting lines.
The handsome husband rented the equipment without asking. He put the headphones on me the way you do when you know words would only get in the way. And then he let me go.
No stopwatch.
No expectation.
No pressure.
Just snow. Breath. Country music.
Alone. Again.
I pushed off.
And somewhere between the first glide and the second, something shifted. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just enough. The kind of shift you feel when something that once broke you suddenly feels like flying again. Yes, I have flying over those bloody tracks!
Not towards something, not proving anything — just moving. Feeling my body come alive and finding closure.
And for the first time in a very long time, I was genuinely happy — not even aware that something had been missing until it wasn’t anymore.
Yes, now you’re probably wondering when I’ll finally write that first sports rom-com.
I have 27 drafts.
That should tell you everything.
Some stories take time. Some are still too close to home.
So you’ll have to be patient with this one.
Go and watch some Olympic ice hockey. Or find one of those documentaries where athletes watch their own footage back. Trust me — it’s worth it.
Or put on Alex Warren and Luke Combs singing Ordinary.
That’s what played while I wrote this. Somehow, it softened the edges.
Ruby
