The road to the Olympics is paved with disappointment, discouragement — and overcoming

I was greeted today in the Charles De Gaulle Airport by 2024 Paris Olympic volunteers — boasting purple shirts and holding signs welcoming the world to their beautiful city.

It was hard not to feel their energy and excitement in this town replete with Olympic messaging.

Reaching Paris marked, for me, the end of a long journey.

I left for France three days earlier, just as a major tech outage derailed services around the world. I had plans to represent the Deseret News at events connected with the 2024 Paris Olympics and be close when Utah is — hopefully — awarded the 2034 Winter Games. A final vote by the International Olympic Committee is scheduled for Wednesday in Paris.

But I didn’t have any idea how the rippling of thousands of Delta Air Lines planes, grounded in what may be the biggest cyber outage in history , would derail my journey.

I was delayed three days — flying from three cities, spending hours booking and rebooking delayed or canceled flights, missing connections, standing in long lines and waiting on hold for representatives from the airline or my travel agency.

Frustrations were high, expectations low, tempers short and exhaustion imminent.

For me the road to the Olympics was not easy.

It’s fitting, I guess, because that journey never is.

Peter Vidmar, who was in Paris this weekend, competed in the 1984 Olympics — and won two gold medals and a silver.

In the decade before that moment, he trained six days a week , missing only about 20 training days total in the 10 years.

In 1979, at age 18, he was the youngest member of the U.S. team that took home the bronze medal in the World Championship. But a year later, after qualifying for the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, he did not compete because of the Olympic Committee’s boycott of the Summer Games.

Then, three years later, Vidmar was positioned to win gold during the 1983 world championships. “I was in second place going into the finals on the horizontal bar. The gymnast from Japan that was in first place made a mistake. So, all I had to do was hit my routine successfully, and I’d be the world champion.”

But he didn’t.

“I made a mistake, a horrible mistake,” he said.

He walked back to the hotel alone, feeling like a failure.

“My coach said, ‘Peter, this isn’t the end. You’re always learning until your last day of gymnastics.’”

During every training session for the next six months he worked the failed skill every day.

“On that same performance in the ‘84 Olympics, I scored a perfect 10,” he said. “So looking back, I can say I’m really glad I failed.”

Rudi Sordes , who composed music for the opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, expressed a similar sentiment about his Olympic journey. “Resilience to failure is an essential factor for success,” he said. “This cannot be repeated enough. If you’re not ready for failure, you are simply not ready for success.”

The same can be said for many competing in the 2024 Games.

Courtney Wayment , who will compete in the 3,000-meter steeplechase in coming weeks, missed the 2021 Games by a few seconds. In a system where the top three athletes compete, Wayment was fourth. “I was the first person off of the Olympic team three years ago.”

Like Vidmar, however, the journey was as important as the destination. “When you’re racing and you have two laps left, and you wholeheartedly believe that you can be an Olympian, and then you don’t get that dream, that was OK, because I believed. And that, to me, I was like, ‘One day, it’ll pay off. The belief will pay off.’”

Wayment’s Olympic teammate Whittni Morgan persevered through nine injuries in the past eight years — undergoing surgery just last November to repair the patellar tendon.

“That woman worked harder than anyone I know,” her coach Diljeet Taylor told the Deseret News .

Jimmer Ferdette , who will suit up for men’s 3x3 basketball competition, also endured frustration and disappointment on the road to the Olympics.

The star of BYU’s 2011 basketball team, Fredette led the team to the Sweet 16 in the NCAA tournament, won the 2011 Naismith Player of the Year award and was the 10th overall pick in the 2011 NBA draft .

But after signing with Sacramento, things did not go as he had planned. “All of a sudden, I was not playing nearly as much as I was at BYU,” he said. “I wasn’t playing nearly as well as I was at BYU.”

For the first time in his career, he felt alone and depressed.

“At first it was really hard because he had set such high expectations for his career and he literally didn’t meet any of them,” his wife, Whitney Fredette told the Deseret News .

But he refocused, moved overseas and thrived. Eventually he found his way to 3x3 basketball. “When this presented itself, it gave him a new goal, a new aspiration, and just the ultimate opportunity and the ultimate situation,” Whitney Fredette said.

Fredette spoke to youth and young adult members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Paris on Sunday at the invitation of Presiding Bishop Gérald Caussé , a native of France.

Bishop Caussé said the Olympic message is clear: keep faith in the destination.

Life, he explained, is like a race, but the race “is not always a straight line. Sometimes the road is narrow. Sometimes there are turns and there are setbacks and things that you are not expecting occur during your journey.”

The end desire to participate in the Olympics or win a medal helps athletes work through “discouragement, setbacks and difficulty,” he said.

“It is a great lesson for life,” he said, noting that one day “we will see our setbacks and our discouragement” as “a learning experience that was needed for our progression.”

It reminds me of a line from one of my favorite movies, “A League of Their Own.” In the film Tom Hanks, playing coach Jimmy Dugan, tells a discouraged player, “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.”

While my travel delays cannot be compared to the discouragement, setbacks and difficulties endured most certainly by every athlete — they do illustrate one thing: The journey does define the destination.

Because I wasn’t sure I would reach Paris, the city was more beautiful for me when I arrived. I sat at a little table outside a small café and watched the crowds — including many people proudly boasting Olympic credentials.

The hard is what makes the Games great.

It is a lesson for all of us.

The road to the Olympics — and every journey — is paved with disappointment, discouragement — and overcoming.