The Backward Mentality to Finding Victory

Thirty-five-year-old Italian skier Federica Brignone recently won gold in the women’s giant slalom at this year’s Olympics in Milan. What made it such a noteworthy story was that she was skiing on a surgically repaired knee after a significant crash last April. She even rated herself at 80% of where she wanted to be physically, which gave her a similar story arc to Lindsey Vonn’s, though it received less attention, especially with the American media.

But then she won. And as is so often the case with any kind of comeback story, the spotlights turned to shine upon her and to ask the question, “How did this happen?”

In her article about “the power of not thinking at the Winter Olympics,” Dana O’Neil notes that due to Brignone’s injury and recent sixth place finish at her first race a few weeks ago, she was just happy to even be at the Olympics, competing for the host country in a sport she loves. But then she credits the victory to something you wouldn’t expect:

“[Carrying my country’s flag in the opening ceremonies] was one of the biggest things that I wanted and I was missing in my life. Not the gold medal, I didn’t care. … I had everything I wanted in my life. So I came here just to enjoy and try my best and be grateful to be here at home. And I think this is why I won.”

Great athletes, David Foster Wallace wrote in 1994, “can, in performance, be totally present … They can withstand forces of distraction that would break a mind prone to self-conscious fear in two.” But while Wallace attributed this quality to athletes’ almost naive stupidity, O’Neil finds the answer elsewhere:

It seems a backward mentality to win a medal by not caring about winning one, and yet, considering what has and has not happened in the Olympics, it might truly be the secret to success. There is a strange freedom in not thinking for an athlete. It’s the difference between the 3-point shooter who sinks a shot with a hand in his face and the one who clanks it when he’s wide open. It is that almost magical place where muscle memory takes over and the brain gets out of the way. It does not, in fact, pay to be a thinker.

The conventional wisdom on these things usually has more to do with belief in the self and hard work. But Brignone places the credit elsewhere: it was her focus on other things, and the inner peace that came with not needing to win, that indirectly contributed to the victory. O’Neil is right: it’s backward to how we normally think. Even the ubiquitous self-help-driven commercials that run during the Olympics with the tireless (and tiresome) message of “You can do whatever you put your mind to” sing a different tune, one that Brignone seems to forget to apply to her mind during and after the race. And yet, her experience is often truer than we think or are led to believe. Why do some things seem to come easier when we stop trying so hard to achieve them and when our focus rests on things we already have?

I couldn’t help but see a correlation between all of this and how the Bible shapes our understanding of spiritual victory. For all of Christianity’s eccentricities, this idea that God’s ways are not our ways when it comes to salvation and wholeness might be the most preeminent. There’s something about the Christian life that exemplifies this backward mentality and that Brignone’s free spirit points to. Where does change come from? Where is righteousness sourced? The answer resounds almost everywhere you look in the New Testament: decidedly not from us and, somewhat counterintuitively, not from trying.

The Apostle Paul ruminates about this in his letter to the Philippians, how he shifted from being a man of impeccable rule following to one who left all that behind to rest in the one who died, not just for his sins but for all the good he did to his own credit before God. The irony for Paul was that his faultlessness under the law served to drive a wedge and to drive him to more self-righteous hustle rather than to humility, love, and peace. He learned the secret of wanting to know Jesus and the power of his resurrection and of laying moralistic achievement down — the irony being that once we do this, we end up bearing more fruit for God than our religious rule following ever could. He says elsewhere in Romans 7:4, “We also died to the law through the body of Christ, that we might belong to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God.”

Belonging to Jesus is the secret — to the one who pulls us out from underneath the “you must do’s” of life and who says to us, “I’m all you need.” To use some of O’Neil’s language, he is the “magical place” where righteousness comes apart from striving. The medal we wear, the fruit we bear, isn’t from thinking about the law. It’s given apart from it, backward as that seems.

And when we struggle to believe that’s true, at the center of the Christian faith is a Savior who doesn’t sit at the top of the giant slalom mountain but who comes down to us, wounded knees and nail-pierced hands in all. When we raise that flag, the flag of his grace, and when our focus is placed squarely on him, then and only then do we say with Brignone, “I think that’s why I’m a little different than I used to be.”