It happens every two years, on schedule, to people who consider themselves emotionally composed. A week into the Milan-Cortina Games, my group chats are already full of confessions: cried at a medal ceremony for a sport I cannot explain the rules of; cried at a skater hugging her coach; cried at a forty-year-old crashing out of her last downhill and waving to the crowd anyway. (At least one of those confessions is mine. I won't say which.) The Winter Olympics is, among other things, a fortnight-long global crying event, and because emotions that arrive on a schedule are a psychologist's favorite kind, the question deserves to be asked seriously: what exactly are these tears?
Why Do We Say "We Won"?
The first layer is the most studied. Psychologists call it "basking in reflected glory": the well-documented tendency to absorb the achievements of groups we identify with as if they were partly ours. Fans of a winning team don't just feel pleased; measurable things happen. Mood, confidence, even hormone levels shift with a victory they contributed nothing to. You can hear it in the pronouns, and you've said them yourself: we won, they lost.
The Olympics turbocharges the mechanism by raising the stakes of identification to the largest group most of us belong to: the nation. When Kim Gil-li surged to gold in the short track this week — a result that sent my own family's chat into celebration at ungodly hours — Koreans everywhere experienced something psychologically real: a self temporarily enlarged to the size of a country. The flag on the suit does what no club logo can. It implicates you.
But reflected glory can't be the whole story, because the strangest Olympic tears aren't for our own flag at all. Nobody in my family has any stake in an Italian speed skater or a Norwegian cross-country dynasty (Norway, as usual, is hoarding golds), and the tears come anyway.
What Is a Whole Life Doing in Two Minutes?
The second layer is narrative, and the Olympics manufactures a very particular kind. An Olympic moment has a structure, and once you see it you can't unsee it: a stranger is introduced to you ninety seconds before the most important minutes of their life. A montage supplies the biography: the injury, the funding struggles, the parent in the stands, the four years of 5 a.m. practices. Then you watch, live and unedited, as their entire accumulated existence is compressed into one run, one routine, one race. Triumph and catastrophe sit one slip apart, and everyone, athlete and crowd and you, knows it in real time.
Psychologically, this is a life span compressed into two minutes, and we respond the way we respond to lives: with what researchers call "kama muta," the sudden warmth-and-tears emotion triggered by witnessing profound connection or devotion. It's the same feeling produced by reunions, weddings, and acts of sacrifice. The Olympic broadcast is engineered to produce it; the montages are not decoration, they are the delivery system. You cry at the stranger's gold because you were handed, minutes earlier, everything that gold costs.
I keep thinking about why the crashes move us even more than the wins. Watching a legend's comeback end in a crumpled heap on a mountainside, as the world did this week with Lindsey Vonn's downhill, triggers something beyond sympathy: the recognition that devotion doesn't guarantee the ending, which every adult knows about their own devotions and rarely says out loud. The athlete who waves from the stretcher is performing, on our behalf, the hardest human trick: dignity without the prize.
When Did You Last Feel Like Part of One Body?
The third layer is collective. I've written before about how rarely modern life assembles us, how the shared evening has become culture's scarcest resource. The Olympics is one of the last events that synchronizes a planet: hundreds of millions watching the same run within the same hour, feeling the same gasp. Sociology's term is "collective effervescence," the electric sense of being one body, and its reliable byproduct is tears that arrive not from sadness but from momentary membership in something enormous.
That's also, I suspect, why Olympic crying intensified in the streaming era rather than fading. The more atomized our ordinary viewing, the more physiologically startling synchrony becomes. The tears are partly withdrawal symptoms from a togetherness we no longer practice.
Should We Be Embarrassed?
It's fashionable to debunk all this, and the debunking isn't wrong, exactly. The Games are also a billion-dollar machine of sponsorships and geopolitics; the sentiment is produced and sold; this year's edition even arrives with a poignant structural irony, a Winter Olympics increasingly dependent on artificial snow, staging pastoral alpine mythology inside a warming world. The tears are sponsored. The mountain is half machine. I know all of that, and I keep trying to write the sentence in which knowing it settles the question, and the sentence keeps not arriving, because knowing how a feeling is produced turns out to say very little about whether the feeling is true. I land, gently, on the side of the tears.
Because the emotion underneath is not counterfeit. What the Olympics actually sells is a concentrated dose of things scarce in daily life: visible devotion, unambiguous stakes, strangers made briefly knowable, and a planet watching together. Our tear ducts respond to the concentrate because the ingredients are real, whatever the packaging. When the skater lands it and grabs her coach, when the anthem plays for someone's impossible comeback, when the forty-year-old waves from the snow, the wet eyes in a hundred million living rooms are not being fooled. They're being reminded of what caring completely looks like. We so rarely get to watch.
So cry away. It's the most honest thing on television this fortnight, and I'll be in the group chat, confessing.
