Since the revival of the Olympic Games in 1896, thousands of athletes have dreamed about representing their country and becoming Olympic champions.
During the 1912 games, a new horse-and-rider event called dressage was introduced. It was a competition in which only commissioned military officers—all of them men—were allowed to compete. It stayed that way for 40 years, until the 1952 games in Helsinki, Finland, where, for the first time, the event was opened to all.
During that competition, the world became captivated with a woman rider from Denmark, Lis Hartel. A sport dominated by men, Lis stunned the crowd with a magnificent performance and was awarded the silver medal.
But there is more to the story. At the awards ceremony, when Lis Hartel’s name was announced, the gold-medal winner stepped down from the medals platform to help her climb the steps to her place on the podium. You see, Lis was unable to climb them herself because eight years earlier she had contracted polio and had been paralyzed from the waist down.
When her condition was first diagnosed, most believed that her riding days were over, but Lis refused to abandon her dream, no matter how impossible it seemed. After years of rehabilitation, she regained enough muscle control to ride a horse. She began to train. And eventually her determination led her to the medals platform in Helsinki.
The Olympic motto is Citius, Altius, Fortius: Faster, Higher, Stronger. But for most of us, the great challenges of life do not require that we sprint faster or jump higherthan someone else.
The example of Lis Hartel reminds us that the greatest champions are those who never stop believing in their worthy dreams no matter how great the obstacles that confront them.
Perhaps there is no better definition of a champion.
Program #3991