As any sports fan knows, the Paris Olympics have arrived. This year’s Games, as with each of these quadrennial festivals of global sport, I’m rooting for everybody Black. Issa Rae said this during the 2017 Emmy Awards, and it is easy to apply this principle to the Olympics, which, with its provocative patriotism and proxy-war-like “nation vs. nation” orientation, are the perfect forum for using a broader diasporic focus to push back against that hypernationalism. Yes, I’m rooting for everybody Black.

I’m a big aficionado of athletics, what we call track and field here in the US. I once harbored dreams of Olympic glory after watching Carl Lewis on his golden run at the 1984 Los Angeles Games. But neither genetics nor discipline allowed my early promise to blossom beyond a few blue ribbons in bantam-age competitions. After puberty, I stuck with being a fan. Yes, my natural tendency is to root for the ol’ Stars and Stripes during international competitions. But while watching the 1991 World Athletics Championships in Tokyo, I took note of the men’s 4 x 100 relay medal ceremony: on the podium stood 12 Black men from three nations—France, Great Britain, and the United States. That sight was a diasporic awakening for me, a (now naive) realization that Black folk lived outside of Africa, North America, and the Caribbean. Forgive me, I was still young and unaware of our ever-growing global presence.

I root for everybody Black because the Olympic Games were not designed with people of color in mind; indeed, this type of organized sporting was seen as a gentleman’s pursuit by way of membership in upper-crust amateur “clubs.” This “amateurism” was actually a concept that arose at the end of the nineteenth century to make sports the province only of those wealthy enough not to worry about being paid: “specifically, snooty British elites who enjoyed rowing, winning, and keeping the unwashed, day-laboring masses at arm’s length,” as Dave Zirin writes in Brazil’s Dance with the Devil. When the modern Games were revived in 1896, thousands of years after their Greek origins, most people of color in the world were subjugated in colonized territories, segregated social systems, or both, rendering them excluded from the circles of eligible athletes.

The Games have even upheld white-supremacist notions at times, as demonstrated by the collusion between Avery Brundage, nicknamed “Slavery Avery,” longtime president of the International Olympic Committee, and the Nazi regime hosting the 1936 Berlin Games: “Brundage was the … unquestioned leader of the IOC,” Zirin writes. “Although, as late as 1941, he had been publicly praising the Reich, this did nothing to slow his rise. He remained chief of the IOC until 1972.” The expulsion of sprinter medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos for their now-iconic 1968 Black Power demonstration on the medal podium was carried out at Brundage’s insistence. That move certainly didn’t age well, as Smith and Carlos are now universally lauded as heroes. Even now, I question why there are (Northern Hemisphere) Winter Olympics that, by their very nature, rule out robust participation from tropical—that is, browner and blacker—nations. Cool Runnings may have been an upbeat narrative based on the true experience of the first Jamaican bobsled team, but the glaring lack of Afrodescendant athletes in the Winter Games is not okay with me.

This is an opportunity to celebrate the diaspora on “the world’s biggest stage,” as the Games’ supporters like to say. To celebrate physically impressive melanated humans in an invariable wide range of (taut) shapes and sizes, radiating a whiskey-golden halo from the sheen of sweat-covered faces while exerting themselves toward the pinnacle of kinetic achievement. Mmm. 

Let me get myself together.

I’m rooting for Enzo Lefort, the French fencer who proudly amplifies Guadelopean excellence in fencing, while explaining how enslaved Africans on the island created the mayolè, an extended baton used in a combative dance, providing the cultural roots for fencing excellence. Enzo was inspired by fellow Antillean trailblazer Laura Flessel-Colovic, the five-time Olympic medalist, when she struck gold in the 1996 individual épée event. 

I’m rooting for the radiant Kenyan Faith Kipyegon in her quest to continue her streak of gold medals in the 1,500-meter run, which she won the last two Olympics in Rio and Tokyo (after taking time off to give birth to her daughter) while setting world records in the 1,500 meters and mile with displays of brilliant technique and speed endurance. 

I’m rooting for the giants of the South Sudanese basketball team, the Bright Stars, who came within one LeBron James layup of besting a professional all-star US team in pre-Olympic play. One can’t help but love an underdog rising to the occasion, especially after witnessing Charles Barkley’s flagrant elbowing of outsized Angolan player Herlander Coimbra in the 1992 Games, a Goliath versus David matchup.

I’m rooting for Simone Manuel and Ashleigh Johnson in the pool, where we don’t often see melanated folks. Simone is back in form after winning the marquee 50-meter sprint in the US Olympic Trials, one of the world’s most competitive swim meets. Ashleigh Johnson, reputed to be the world’s best women’s water polo goalkeeper, returns to anchor Team USA as Flavor Flav hypes up the cheering squad from the stands. 

Circling back to underdogs, no one else won me over as fast as the white-clad contingent of the Refugee Olympic Team proudly riding the bateau mouche down the Seine during the opening ceremony. The contingent “represents more than 100 million forcibly displaced people worldwide.” I absolutely want them to win too. And If I expand the notion of Blackness to represent underdogs (similar to how queerness is the antithesis of heteronormativity), I’m rooting for all people everywhere who push back against oppression, be they Palestinians, Indian workers, or working-class Latin Americans, among others.

I’m rooting for the many Olympians who are not household names or participating in headline sports, whose dedication, hard work, and personal triumphs may go unseen by the viewing public. I’m rooting for the ways the Black and Afrodescendant people show up for their nations, whether on the continent or steps removed in the diaspora. My hope is that there is a larger camaraderie between the athletes and even competitors, especially as we continue to face down anti-Black and anti-African attitudes globally (consider the recent controversy from the Argentinian football team). So I don’t really care what the nation-by-nation medal count is at the end of the day; I want Black folks everywhere to win.