Competing With Joy: Leadership Lessons from the Winter Olympics

What two weeks of Olympic competition taught me about the only scoreboard that really matters

I didn't plan to write this newsletter. I planned to watch a few events, cheer for some athletes, and get back to work. Instead, I spent two weeks glued to my screen, notebook beside me, furiously writing down things that had nothing to do with sports and everything to do with leadership, life, and what it actually means to show up with your whole self. The 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Games gave me gifts I wasn't expecting. This is my attempt to give some of them to you.

Before I get to the stories that moved me most, I want to stop and acknowledge something the broadcast coverage never quite captures.

Thousands of athletes made it to these Games. Most of their names never crossed your screen. They came from small countries and enormous ones, from programs with unlimited funding and programs held together with tape and belief. They trained for years — some for their entire lives — for a competition that would last minutes or seconds. They made it.

That alone is extraordinary. And in a world that only celebrates the podium, I think we lose something important when we forget that showing up — fully, fearlessly, at the highest level you can reach — is its own form of winning. I believe that about athletes. I believe it about leaders, too. Now, the stories.

There is a version of Alysa Liu's story that the sports world tried to write for her — prodigy, pressure, comeback, gold. She had other ideas.

What Alysa gave us instead was something rarer and, I'd argue, more important: she skated for joy. She spoke openly about mental health, about the cost of performing for external validation, about choosing to compete on her own terms. And she did it without apology and without the kind of manufactured inspiration that rings hollow the moment it leaves the arena.

Here's what I know to be true after 35 years leading teams: you cannot sustain excellent performance from a place of fear or obligation. You can produce results for a while. You can hit your numbers. But the leaders who last — the ones whose teams would follow them anywhere — have found a way to love what they do even when it's hard. Joy is not soft. Joy is a strategy.

Alysa reminded me of that. I hope she reminded you too.

Your “Ask for an Answer”Moment: What would change about how you show up tomorrow if you were doing your work for joy rather than for the scoreboard?

Ilia Malinin was supposed to win individual gold. He didn't. What happened next is what I want to talk about.

No excuses. No visible bitterness. No social media spiral. Just a young man who acknowledged the result, congratulated the athletes who outperformed him, and moved forward. Quietly. With dignity.

I've watched a lot of leaders over the years struggle with this exact moment — the gap between what they expected and what actually happened. Some of them handle it with grace. A lot of them don't. And here's the hard truth: your team is always watching how you react when things don't go your way. Always. That moment tells them everything about whether it's safe to take risks, admit mistakes, or bring you bad news.

Ilia Malinin is 19 years old, and he already understands something that takes many executives decades to learn, if they ever do: how you lose in public is a leadership act.

Your “A4AA” Moment: The last time something didn't go your way at work, what did your reaction teach the people around you — and is that the lesson you meant to give them?

Riku Miura and Ryuichi Kihara were favorites. After the short program, they were in fifth place.

Let that sink in for a moment. Fifth place. With the free skate still ahead. With the pressure of a nation watching, with the weight of expectation, with every commentator recalibrating their predictions.

They won gold.

They didn't win by reinventing themselves overnight. They didn't panic and try to become a different team. They went deeper into exactly who they already were — their connection, their artistry, their trust in each other — and let that carry them.

I've seen leaders make the mistake of abandoning their identity the moment they hit a rough patch. They pivot their strategy, change their communication style, second-guess every instinct. Sometimes that's necessary. But more often, the path through adversity isn't reinvention — it's recommitment. Recommitment to your strengths, your values, your people, your vision.

Riku and Ryuichi didn't change. They deepened.

Your A4AA Moment: When you're under pressure, do you double down on who you are — or start performing a version of yourself you think others want to see?

Let me tell you what it looks like when an entire country decides that winning is a collective act.

The Dutch speedskating team didn't just dominate the oval at Milan-Cortina. They gave the world a masterclass in what happens when individual talent is held inside a culture of genuine collaboration — where skaters who just competed against each other on the ice turn around and cheer each other home from the boards with what appears to be completely authentic joy.

Medal after medal. Across distances. Across genders. Across generations of athletes who train together, push each other, and have built something that no single coach or federation directive could manufacture: a shared identity that is bigger and more durable than any individual performance.

And then there are the fans.

The orange army that fills those stands is not a crowd. It's a community. Coordinated, loud, joyful, and utterly committed to celebrating every Dutch skater regardless of where they finish. They don't quiet down when their favorite doesn't podium. The energy doesn't shift when the medal goes somewhere else. They showed up for the experience of being together in service of something they love — and that devotion feeds the athletes in ways that pure athletic preparation never could.

I've been thinking about this a lot in the context of my own work building The League of Radical Kindness. What the Dutch have figured out — both the athletes and the fans — is something most organizations spend years and enormous resources trying to create and never quite get there: a culture where the community itself becomes a competitive advantage. Where belonging to something makes you better at the thing you're doing. Where the people around you aren't threats to your success — they're the fuel for it.

That doesn't happen by accident. It happens because someone, at some point, made a decision about what the culture was going to value. And then they held that line, year after year, skater after skater, until it became simply the way things are done.

The hardest thing to build in any organization is the thing the Dutch already have: people who genuinely want each other to win.

Your “A4AA”Moment: Where in your professional life are you competing alone when the culture around you could be making you better — and what's one thing you could do this week to change that?

If you haven't been watching Johannes Hösflot Klaebo dominate Nordic cross-country skiing, I need you to understand something: what he's doing is almost unreasonable.

Race after race. Gold after gold. And what strikes me every time I watch him isn't just the talent — it's the combination. Talent, yes. But also grit that is almost otherworldly. And grace — in how he competes, how he speaks, how he carries the weight of being the best in the world at something.

I've been thinking about this trifecta for years. In my experience, talent alone burns out. You see it constantly — the natural who never had to work for anything, until suddenly the work is all there is, and they don't know how. Grit alone grinds down. I've seen the most disciplined, hard-working leaders hollow themselves out because they never cultivated the artistry that makes hard work sustainable. And grace without the other two is just charm — pleasant but empty.

Longevity in leadership — real longevity — requires all three. And the greatest ones, the Klaebos of the world, have integrated them so completely that you stop seeing them as separate qualities. They just look like excellence.

Your A4AA Moment: Of the three — talent, grit, and grace — which one have you underinvested in, and what would your leadership look like if you gave it more attention starting today?

All of these athletes, in their own way, were answering the same question: What does it mean to compete with joy?

Not recklessly. Not without ambition or preparation or the relentless pursuit of excellence. But from a place of knowing why you're there, who you are, and what you stand for — so that when the scoreboard doesn't cooperate, you still have something solid to stand on. That's what I want for every leader I work with. That's what radical kindness looks like in practice — brought inward first, so you have something real to offer outward. The Olympics end. The lessons don't have to.

And I'll be honest with you about something. Attending an Olympics in person has been on my bucket list for as long as I can remember. Watching these Games from my couch for two weeks only made that clearer. Life is short. Joy is fleeting. Time is precious.

See you in LA for the 2028 Summer Games.

If this newsletter moved you, I'd love for you to share it with one leader in your life who needs to hear it today. And if you're not yet a subscriber to Fielding Thoughts, I hope you'll join us. We show up every other week — no fluff, no performance, just honest conversation about leading better.

Jim Fielding is the author of All Pride, No Ego, host of the Ask for An Answer podcast, and a trusted advisor to leaders navigating the intersection of performance, purpose, and radical kindness.Sentence 1 of the signoff