team marched into the stadium together and around the track. They had met during the opening ceremonies, when the whole U.S. The smell in the room is clean but animal. Their bodies have been trained to sweat they gleam with it. The hair on his legs and in his groin is sparse and blond, and tufts of it, trimmed short, sprout from his armpits. He is less elegant but just as functional: powerful bulldog legs, a wide pale chest, abs like the bumps on a turtle ’s shell. She is utterly hairless, long-limbed, flat and tight in the belly, pale across her breasts and pelvis with stark tan lines from her speed suit. They have left the lights on because why not? They have nothing to show but perfection. If they could only lie quietly and make small talk like most first-time lovers, everything would be fine, but the other couple’s sounds remind them of their recent sex and embarrass them. Stronger.” They giggle and look at the ceiling to avoid each other’s eyes. “I think he might like his limelight to be no-hassle.”Ī prolonged groan vibrates through the wall, and the hurdler makes a round-mouthed face of astonishment. Her bicep stands up, so distinct he can see exactly where the muscle attaches to the bone. “Did you know he was gay?” the hurdler asks, curling one long arm up over her head and tapping a gold fingernail against the wall. In the event finals, he picked up another silver and a bronze. He was on all the late-night talk shows, cool in front of the cameras, making little jokes. “Focus up.” His teammate, the new silver medalist, had been brilliant on the high bar, better than ever before in his life, and excellent on the floor and solid through the other rotations. “Get your head in the game,” his coach had said, holding him by the face. Of the American men, he was predicted to have the best chance at the all-around-he was second at Worlds-but he fell off the pommel horse and stepped out of bounds on the floor exercise. In the team competition, they finished fourth. The gymnast, though well-satisfied by the hurdler, listens and feels wistful for that kind of exultant, lusty celebration. Through the wall, they hear the individual all-around silver medalist having furious sex with a Frenchman who throws the discus. His roommate had agreed to sleep across the hall, on the floor between a rings specialist and the gymnastics team’s old warhorse, age twenty-eight, who is at his third Games and spends most of his time icing his knees.
She and the gymnast are in a narrow twin bed, his. They were to match her gold-painted acrylic fingernails and the gold track shoes she wore even though she was never expected to medal and did not get past the quarterfinals, in which she’d fallen over the second hurdle. Her hairdresser back in Miami bleached orangey streaks into her hair that are meant to be gold. The hurdler, a woman, is tall and lean and brown. The gymnast, a man, is short and white and, toes to shoulders, an isosceles triangle. Hamilton Cain, contributing editor at Oprah Daily Like the aviatrix in Great Circle, Shipstead is a fearless explorer, navigating the thorny contradictions of our humanity with grace and confidence. And from this casual coupling comes a gorgeous meditation on the dimming of expectations and the solace of sex.Ī resident of Los Angeles, Shipstead is the author of three novels, including last year’s exhilarating Great Circle, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and named one of Oprah Daily’s Favorite Books of 2021. Both have watched the lure of gold, the years of hard work, leak out like helium from a balloon. “They have nothing to show but perfection.… Their bodies have been trained to sweat they gleam with it.” Both have failed to medal: The hurdler tripped in her heat, while the gymnast tumbled off the pommel horse. “They have left the lights on because why not?” Shipstead writes. “In the Olympic Village,” Oprah Daily’s exclusive excerpt from Maggie Shipstead’s forthcoming collection of short stories, turns on a one-night stand between two American athletes-a white male gymnast from Kansas and a Floridian hurdler, a woman of color-as they linger in bed, basking in the afterglow.