Politics & Power Quote by Brian Boitano

Boitano’s sentence has the breathless, committee-room sprawl of modern sports culture: big ideals, real hardship, and then the hard pivot to a URL. That pivot is the point. He’s trying to keep the Olympic “spirit” from sounding like a poster slogan by anchoring it to perseverance and obstacle-clearing - virtues Americans reliably applaud because they translate neatly into personal narrative. But he also knows that narrative doesn’t circulate on its own anymore. It needs a mechanism. So the moral language is immediately paired with participation: “have everybody can vote on-line.”

The intent is democratic and promotional at once. On its face, it’s an invitation to the public to recognize athletes for character, not just medals. Underneath, it’s a recognition that legitimacy now comes from visibility and buy-in. An award about intangible values becomes tangible through clicks, and “Olympic spirit” gets routed through the same engagement logic that powers reality TV and brand fandom.

The subtext is that greatness is no longer judged solely by insiders - coaches, officials, journalists - but by a crowd. That’s uplifting (more voices, more stories) and slightly uneasy (popularity as proxy for virtue). Boitano, an athlete from an era when the Olympics still pretended to be above mass-market churn, is effectively translating old-school ideals into the language of the current attention economy.

Even the clunky phrasing reads as authentic: he’s not polishing a thesis, he’s selling a bridge between meaning and momentum. Perseverance is the message; online voting is the distribution.