Da they were lying on the blue hockey field. Devastated. The bronze medal slipped through the fingers in the game against India. The dream burst after five years of hard work. Perhaps also weighs down the soul with the feeling that it has not done justice to the legacy of previous generations: The German men’s hockey faction comes back from the Olympic Games for the first time in 21 years without precious metal. It’s not a disaster. Not much is missing from the world’s best.
Other team sports in the German Olympic Sports Confederation would like to have the problem. The handball selection traveled to Tokyo as a self-proclaimed medal candidate and then left again after the quarter-finals. In the soccer team, it wasn’t even enough to fully occupy all of the squad positions: final stage of the preliminary round. The basketball selection was already drinking with joy given the qualification at the last minute. They achieved a single victory before Slovenia (2.1 million inhabitants) saw a class difference. In beach volleyball, officially part of team sports, men and women at least had the semi-finals in mind.
Everyone else looked at the Olympics from afar: the women’s team of the DFB, the handball and basketball players, the entire volleyball, water polo and rugby scene. Even in the 3 × 3 basketball variant, which was played for the first time, still the little brother of beach volleyball, but has been sponsored by the world association for ten years, Germans were not allowed to pick up the ball: too bad. Only seven out of at least 18 teams qualified. They ultimately return empty-handed, for the first time since the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta. Can’t the Germans play together?
What was missing in Tokyo
There is no one-size-fits-all explanation for the overall poor picture of Tokyo because the conditions cannot be compared. Women’s hockey, volleyball, basketball and handball, water polo, rugby are sports practiced by amateurs with professional standards. The athletes must study or work at the same time. While there is less money in handball, there is a lack of individual class, in basketball there was a lack of willingness here and there to endanger the individual career for the summer games. In football, the disdain for Olympia was palpable, although the enthusiasm for the teams that were so successful in Rio in 2016 knew hardly any boundaries.
There is an Olympic phenomenon behind this. The teams always have time during an Olympic tournament and appear as fans in, yes, team strength at competitions of their compatriots in individual sports. That exhilarates, motivates, gives an extra boost – and connects. In Tokyo, growing together was hardly possible due to the pandemic rules such as the mutual ban on visits. But the more athletes missed this feeling and talked about it, the more often they raved about small moments of rapprochement, at least in the Olympic village, the clearer it became what distinguishes the Olympics from all other sports competitions: the great shared experience.
In successful teams, these complex structures, you can see what it takes. The insight and the ability, above all, of the players to share, to withdraw and move forward at the right moment. This is the prerequisite for harmonious interaction, whether on the field or in a company. Those who consistently promote this in children will win more than can ever be counted.
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