A smile that hides pain..! – Hassan Mustakawi

** China won the gold medal in acrobatic synchronized swimming, the United States took second place, and Spain took third place. The performances of the three groups were novel and creative. When the results were announced, the Chinese and American champions gave another lesson about the Olympics and humanity. The scene of the Chinese swimmers and the American swimmers hugging reinforced the idea that the Olympics are the greatest peaceful sport known to mankind. Such scenes are repeated in every game, every competition. The losers respect the victory of the winners. Embrace, love, appreciate and admire creativity. (By the way, for those who don’t know, for those who solve public opinion by describing the competition as war, conspiracy, fraud and deception, this is called sportsmanship, and the losers are in crisis and betrayed..) People wake up and understand sports, competition, humanity and sportsmanship? !

** Every male or female champion at the Olympic or World Championship level has gone through great pains in hard training, deprived of the joys of life, and adhered to a daily routine and schedule that could not be deviated from, whether it was training time, sleeping time or meal time. There were no luxuries that could spoil the path to the top, and the top was wide-ranging and not limited to gold, silver and bronze medals, as many spectators associate the champion with medals in these competitions.

** Synchronized swimming competition swimmers train an average of 40 hours a week, in addition to weightlifting, including swimming, gymnastics, flexibility, yoga and competitive training. Regular training includes three minutes of underwater training, during which they hold their breath, and the training usually starts at 8 am in the gym and is conducted by strength and conditioning coaches. After an hour and a half, they go directly to the pool every day until 5 pm. You can imagine how hard the training is. Each movement in synchronized swimming has a certain degree of difficulty, just like gymnastics.

** The costumes that synchronized swimmers wear distract from the difficulty of the sport. Physical fitness must be high, flexible and strong while faking a smile, which is necessary because smiling is part of the competition and it sends a message to the judges and the audience that each competitor is happy, cheerful and satisfied with this dance and diving above and below the water. That smile masks the degree of pain and the extent of the suffering.

** The Olympics are coming to an end and we will lose the joy of watching sports, the joy of creativity, innovation and imagination in sports, the joy of struggle and hard work, the joy of that unique relationship between horses. The joy of diversity at the Olympic table and the joy of meeting thousands of people from different countries, different ethnicities, different religions, different skin colors, but playing, competing, creating and enjoying in the cheers and songs of the crowds accompanied by the sound of joyful music that we do not see in the stadiums, which sometimes turn into war fields and arenas, completely without smiles, because sports have become suffering? !