“Three, two, one, go muscles!” will always ring in my head when I reflect on my first (and last) “Olympic Games” as a member of our team, the Songwriters.
The field that extended from Northwestern’s main campus into Lake Michigan was dotted with a rainbow of different colors that represented each instructor group: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, black and white T-shirts and bandanas.
Our instructor group, the Songwriters, diligently decorated ourselves in blue. Deeksha Venkat of Palo Alto, California, smeared blue glitter eye shadow across her cheeks. Our team spirit was undeniably the loudest.
“We would always get together and do chants and huddles,” Declan Smith of Chicago said. “Mary Lou was also there with us, making funny comments, taking photos of us, sending them to the group chat. Go muscles.”
We chanted our way to victory.
“Songwriters on me, Songwriters on three, one, two, three, Songwriters!”
In the first challenge of the balloon toss, I locked eyes with my partner. The balloon launched out of her hands and arched through the sky. I winced when I caught the balloon, feeling the water swooshing inside the rubber.
“I, I believe, I believe that we can win!”
The second challenge was the three-legged race. I was confident. I felt that I had watched enough reality shows to understand how to grasp the rhythm. But that certainty shattered when I watched the bandana tying my and my partner’s legs together slip down and unravel. Yet, we persisted as we doubled over in laughter, stumbling over the finish line to achieve another impressive second.
Despite previous success, we were bound to confront challenges.
With no cheer leading up to the third game of tug-of-war, we failed miserably. Our hands were torn and burned from the friction of the rope, landing us dead last for that round. But the ambition inside the Songwriters was not extinguished.
We cheered each other on. We supported each other, even when we weren’t performing our best. We celebrated together whenever anyone accomplished something. We were one.
“Let’s go, Gigi, let’s go! Let’s go, Gigi, let’s go!”
The sky dimmed as our team moved to our last challenge — dizzy bat. We shouted personalized cheers for each of our team members. We tried chanting, “We will, we will rock you.” But it was embarrassingly awkward. So we stopped. And yet we still claimed first place.
“I think we had the best team spirit out of all the other groups,” Skye Dean of Los Gatos, California, said. “We had some really vibrant team members who just kept it going throughout every single challenge. When people were competing, we would always yell their name and cheer for them.”
Our collective team spirit eventually paid off when we earned our position on the silver podium. But when a field of laughter echoes in my head, reminding me of the community I am part of now, I realized I gained much more than a silver medal.
