OPINION — For one day, it felt like St. George was the center of the world. Yet St. George never felt so small.
Saturday saw the Ironman World Championship leave the pineapple fields of Hawaii for the first time in favor of the fry sauce of Southern Utah. From dawn until midnight, the best triathletes in the world were swimming in our reservoir and biking and running on our streets, and the world was watching.
And so were the people of St. George who came out in droves to cheer from their camping chairs or volunteer to hand out water. Kids and teenagers even ran alongside competitors.
After so much discord and division in the last two years over politics and the pandemic, it felt as if there had never been such a sense of community here than there was on Saturday as people cheered in unison for strangers who demonstrated the most extraordinary feats human beings can perform.
Royal Oaks Park in the Dixie Downs area of St. George was indicative of many sites along the race route. It had the look of a big picnic for the Fourth of July with several people taking places along the course.
It wasn’t hard to know another competitor was coming down 1400 West. The sound of clapping and cheering down the block could be heard approaching like a distant wave until it reached you.
It didn’t matter whether the racer was male or female, what country they represented or whether they were in first place or far back in the pack – each received the same warm greeting.
A lot of it might have been an appreciation for the extraordinary accomplishment of each competitor. By the time people at the park were seeing them, they had already swam from one side of Sand Hollow Reservoir to the other and back, then biked from there to Veyo to Gunlock to downtown, then were halfway on running one of two loops from the Tabernacle around Black Rock Hill up to Snow Canyon Parkway down to Dixie Drive to Mathis Park and back.
As late as just before midnight, there were still racers going through the trails at Royal Oaks Park. At 11:40 p.m., long after the race began at 6:30 in the morning, the last three competitors moved through the park.
The many who were here earlier clapping and cheering each runner were gone, but there are still sounds of approval: The ribbits of the frogs in the Halfway Wash adjoining the trail.
It seems nearly impossible to contemplate that one human being could do this, let alone thousands of competitors. It will be very hard from now on to grumble about having to take the drive over to the nearest supermarket.
The cheers that came from the onlookers earlier that day were infectious.
“Let’s go, Tyler! Good work.” “Keep going, Lisa! You can do it!” came the yells of encouragement. The crowd had no idea who Tyler or Lisa were other than the names on their race bibs. But they were cheered on as if they were a family member.
They knew nothing about Tyler or Lisa other than they were performing a seemingly impossible human achievement. They could have been Latter-day Saints or Muslims. They could have been Democrat or Republican. It didn’t matter. The cheering was the same. And everyone did it together. It felt like St. George was unified in applauding each other.
Oh, there was still some negativity and grumbling on social media about road closures, but maybe it’s time we realized that we may notice that negativity so much more because there’s actually less of it. For every one negative comment about Ironman, there were hundreds of others enjoying the moment Saturday.
As quickly as the Ironman came in, most of the signs of it were already gone by Sunday, yet walking through the supermarket a day later, people were still talking about it. A lot of the buzz was about just how good our town looked on TV. Watching the TV coverage, you could set a watch by the number of times the commentators talked about how beautiful the area was. The world saw the beauty of St. George, and it could be argued that the people of St. George saw the beauty in themselves.
This doesn’t mean we’re going to agree on everything, nor should we. But at least using Saturday’s example, we could try to listen more to each other. At worst, we could agree to disagree. At best, we can find common ground in between the division. But rather than think the worst of each other, we can still find a way to cheer each other on like we did on Saturday.
It just felt like if people can accomplish what they did in the Ironman, they can accomplish anything. And if St. George can pull off an international sporting event, maybe St. George, and its people, can unify and accomplish just about anything.
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