Olympians embrace the mystery of their devotion; the Milanese might understand it better than most

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Chris Jones reports from Milan.

When Milan isn’t hosting the Winter Olympics, one of its principal attractions is Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, his fresco inside the monastery of the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Visitors lucky enough to see it bear witness to more than one kind of miracle.

Leonardo finished it in 1498. His perfectionism had its costs: He painted on dry plaster rather than wet, the way frescos were traditionally done, so that he could work more slowly, more meticulously, labouring over each pained expression, each piece of fruit.

His paint didn’t hold, and one of his most fragile masterpieces began to fade.

By 1977, after centuries of neglect, humidity, bomb damage, and misguided preservation attempts, the fresco was nearly unrecognizable. That’s when a 52-year-old woman named Pinin Brambilla saw it, became obsessed with it, and began a restoration that would consume more than 20 years of her life.

Devotion is hard to measure. It is more than an expression of ordinary affection. Devotion is a demonstration of extraordinary love, a level of passion that people who don’t have it, who have never felt it, struggle to understand.

It can be mysterious even for the people who do feel it.

Courtney Sarault won four short track medals here. She is a pure athlete, good at many sports. Soccer fell away. Hockey fell away. Speed skating was the one that stuck.

“There was something inside me … I just could not let go of speed skating,” she said. “I don’t know why. I can’t replicate the feeling I get on the ice anywhere else in my life. It’s hard to explain, but I’m sure anyone who’s ever been an athlete understands the feeling. It’s a feeling that’s hard to describe, but I love that feeling. That’s what makes me do it.”

I can’t replicate the feeling I get on the ice anywhere else in my life.– 4-time medallist Courtney Sarault

Every Winter Olympian is a beautiful maniac. They spend decades training to become the person who can fly the farthest on skis or curl polished granite to a particular spot on the ice or cross-country ski the fastest while also shooting a gun the most accurately, as though every sport is a diabolical invention made to trap only them.

And then once every four years they get an opportunity to show the world that they are the best at this one strange thing, and if they somehow manage to turn their lifetimes of sacrifice into a few seconds of brilliance, their reward is a circular piece of metal on a ribbon.

None of it makes any sense.

Unless you look at the Olympics, at these athletes, in a different way, through a different lens.

When Pinin Brambilla began her painstaking work, she probably had no idea what lay ahead for her. She was married and had a son. She had a rich life outside the walls of that monastery, and she knew that time is precious.

But as she worked on each tiny section of the fresco, looking through her magnifying glass and using a surgeon’s tools to uncover what remained of Leonardo’s genius, she couldn’t help herself. She poured more and more of her skill and patience into The Last Supper. “I was totally obsessed,” she told the BBC before she died, at 95, in 2020.

When visitors go to see that luminous fresco, they don’t see her work. They see Leonardo’s. They don’t even know her name. She didn’t do what she did for adulation, money, or fame. She did it because she saw something glorious, and she had the inexplicable instinct to save it.

Over the last 15 days, when you’ve watched Courtney Sarault skate, or Megan Oldham ski, or Éliot Grondin snowboard, or Piper Gilles and Paul Poirier dance — when you’ve watched Macklin Celebrini lifting backhand after backhand into the roof of the net before a game, or Marie-Philip Poulin dissolve into tears after one — you haven’t been watching athletes compete for medals.

“It’s love,” Sarault said.

You’ve been watching expressions of devotion. You’ve been watching acts of extreme faith.

That’s why it will hurt on Sunday when it’s over, the way love’s end always does. 

“When I finished work on the painting, I was sad because I had to leave it,” Brambilla said. “For every work I restore, a part of it stays with me, something of the artist. Distancing myself is always difficult. It’s as if you lose a part of yourself.”

But that lost part hasn’t been discarded. It hasn’t disappeared. It’s found in the hearts of others, in the people who stand and look at a rendering of sacrifice, layer upon layer of it, and can’t explain the tears in their eyes or the weight in their chest or why it’s suddenly hard for them to breathe.

All they know is that they are feeling something, and it feels like a gift.