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.