A childhood habit of toe-walking can strike fear inside the hearts of parents. For Janice Kehler, hoisting herself onto the balls of her feet to discover her world was pure joy that morphed into an adolescence spent chasing an Olympic dream. A dream fashioned by the Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin in the early twentieth century and molded by the sports-media complex over the next hundred years. A dream that was on a collision course with the deep historical roots of the best-you-can-be and win-at-all-cost attitudes.
Ode to Olympic Dreams is a collection of personal essays and historical conundrums that manifest her stubbornness and naivety to fit into the world of Olympic sport. She became a student-athlete branded as an Olympic hopeful whose ‘student-ness’ intersected with scientific discovery. Meanwhile, terrorism, doping scandals, and the exploitation of athletes turned the world of sport upside down.
Out of this chaos, she discovered another set of stories. Using the lens of hindsight, a human holistic sense of movement emerged, linked to the mysterious habits of toe-walking and breathlessness, to tell the never-ending, hopeful story of Coubertin’s Olympism.