Skier provides the feel-good moment of the Beijing Games

ZHANGJIAKOU, China — For all the greed and fecklessness of the IOC, for all the sins of the host country, for all the duplicitous, deceptive and outright illegal behavior of the nations competing … the best thing about the Olympics has always been the Olympians.

Their brilliance, their strength in the face of adversity, their generosity in victory and grace in defeat … it all makes the Olympics a must-watch event every four years. Olympians exhibit levels of humanity that the people responsible for creating, hosting and running the Games struggle to match.

On the high, windy hills of the National Cross Country Center, Ivo Niskanen of Finland easily won the men’s 15km cross country race, defeating his nearest challenger by 23 seconds. It was Niskanen’s moment, his opportunity to ascend to the podium and enjoy a brief moment as the best in the world at what he did.

Instead, he waited.

Niskanen stood at the finish line and waited for every single one of the 94 skiers behind him to finish the race. The last, Colombia’s Carlos Andres Quintana, finished nearly 20 clock minutes behind Niskanen, and a half hour behind him because of the staggered start. But Niskanen made it clear that his medal ceremony would not begin until Quintana crossed the finish line. Olympians know exactly how hard it is to reach this level, regardless of where one finishes.

“Well done,” Niskanen told Quintana, who said later he had been struggling the entire race.

“You need to respect each other as an athlete,” Niskanen said after the race. “Everyone has done lots of work to be here and it means a lot to take him across the finish line. You need that kind of respect in these Olympic Games. Smaller countries don't have as much budget as the best nations.”

Colombia doesn’t exactly have a lengthy history of Winter Olympics success. The nation has only competed in three Winter Olympics — 2010, 2018 and this year — and its best performance to date was a 19th-place finish in the speed skating mass start by Laura Gomez in 2018. Quintana, one of Colombia’s flagbearers in the Opening Ceremony, is one of only three Colombian athletes at the Games this year.

Quintana only began cross-country skiing three years ago, seeing it as the only viable route to achieving his dream of reaching the Olympics.

“I decided to change sport because, even though I wanted triathlon so much and I was doing well nationally, I saw that I could not achieve the dream of my life, which was to qualify for the Olympic Games,” he told a local newspaper in 2021. “So I was looking for another sport in which I had that possibility, I looked at some summer disciplines, but since I didn't find what I wanted, so I decided to look at the winter ones and I found that skiing was the ideal, it suited my conditions.”

He made it. And no matter where he finished, he’s still an Olympian.