This isn’t a national favoritism, but a concession to bias against theatricality: Aside from admiring a bit of stagecraft Olympic opening ceremonies are pointless. Their just flippant pieces of performance art, and let’s leave it at that, OK? The guys tongiht in the ultra neon Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band uniforms, interspersed with the men in top hats doing the British running man are lost on me.
That’s alright, right? There’s no merit in the contradiction of a world now smitten with ecological motifs pumping in carcinogens to remind audience members of the Industrial Revolution. Yes the fumes they pumped in for authenticity are a drop in the bucket (Or, as organizers said: Here’s what you missed when you sat out Beijing!) but it sends the wrong vaporous message. Kind of like monsters in hospitals and in your beds. Good night kids!
Or maybe I’m concentrating on the wrong things. J.K. Rowling was there and she, as we learned from the NBC narration — how on earth would we know what to make of all of this without Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira vapidly explaining things — “made it cool” for kids to read again. If I may be an Olympic buzzkill: parent’s fault.
Rowan Atkinson was Rowan Atkinson and that makes you think of all the other prominent Brits you hoped you’d see: McKellen! Bowie! Jagger! Waters! Idol! Idle! You got Daniel Craig as James Bond and you could be cynical about that, but it was a cute bit with the queen.
And while I was disappointed that the kids in the musical portion of the show hadn’t bothered to learn the words to Bohemian Rhapsody I found it more off-putting that Munich and World War II were ignored altogether. Those were decisions made by the British Olympic Association. NBC’s decisions were equally unfortunate. Saudi Arabia has female Olympians for the first time ever, not that you knew that from watching Lauer and Bob Costas pun away the evening. Here’s their entrance. Worse, perhaps, was the empty mention Costas gave the organizers for not including a tribute to Munich. He’d promised to call out the IOC, but his little spiel was so tepid it felt like someone got to him. And NBC left out a tribute to victims of the 7/7 terrorist attacks. That editorial decision was made so you could see Ryan Seacrest could make sure cameras saw him next to interview Michael Phelps.
But that’s just the opening ceremonies for you. The local guy gets up to express his pride. Everyone has had a colorful party and everything came off just as they intended for the evening. And then he introduces the head of the IOC and you think whatever you think of vague international organizations without oversight.
I just show up for the torch. We discussed this tonight. Our home’s foremost expert and researcher of all things Olympics and I rated the torch experiences of our lifetimes identically.
The world was different. Los Angeles was different. The torch was different in 1984. Gina Hemphill ran through the dark tunnel and into the evening light, carrying a torch and the opening of the Los Angeles Games and the genes of her grandfather — Alabama-native, Olympic great and Hitler beater-extraordinaire Jesse Owens (perhaps you’ve heard of him?) — into the coliseum. She ran a lap around the track and even the athletes were exuberant. They rushed to greet and encourage her, and they almost blocked her path, twice. “Everybody can say they had an Olympic moment,” she said years later, and it felt like we had. Maybe it was because the Soviets stayed home.
She handed the torch off to Rafer Johnson, a decathlete from the 1960 games, who looked in 1984 like he was still ready to go for the gold. (Today he might merely compete, but to be fair, the man is 77. Looks great, too.) He sprinted up that long, long line of steps and stood above the world, and he wasn’t even breathing hard. He held the torch over his head and the flame caught, going through the Olympic rings and up to the cauldron above. It would have been even more dramatic at night. Olympic producers would get wise to television’s needs soon enough.
There was a different kind of oversight in Seoul, where they loosed hundreds of white doves into the stadium and jets drew Olympic rings in they sky with their contrails. Sohn Kee-chung brought the flame into the stadium, he was running knees high, waving to his countrymen. He was the first Korean to medal at the Olympics, at the Berlin Games in 1936, in the marathon. He passed the torch to another person, who ran it under the cauldron, who shared the flame with three others. Those three took the world’s slowest elevator ride to the to top, while the rest of the world said “OK, now what?” in 126 languages. When they got there, several of the doves were … well … if you watch this you’ll realize no one thought this through:
We’ll come to a day when we think of everything from the 1980s as washed out and blocky, a Baby Boomer response to cubism, I’m convinced of it. Archived video online will be the reason. There’s a period where everything from the advent of color television to about, oh, 2003, just doesn’t YouTube very well.
Someone else was also concerned about that when it comes to the 1992 Barcelona Games, and so they uploaded a Spanish-language high-definition version of the torch ceremony. Herminio Menendez, a sprint canoer who won silver in 1976 and a bronze and silver in 1980 ran in the flame, which looked brilliant in the night sky. He ran a lap around the stadium under a lone spotlight before passing the flame to Juan Antonio San Epifanio, who won a silver on the men’s basketball team in 1984. Now Epi is one of the greatest basketball players Europe has ever known, so it was fitting that he ran around and then through the Olympians to find Antonio Rebollo, the now famous, anonymous, archer who competed in the Paralympic Games for Spain:
But! Camera tricks, said the BBC in 2000:
In reality, he had not actually landed the arrow in the middle of the cauldron – he had fired it way outside the stadium as instructed.
Organisers dared not risk his aim failling short and landing into the grandstand and instead told him to fire it directly over the target area… some pyrotechnics-helpful camera angles would take care of the visual effect.
By then though, the opening ceremony had become an Olympic event in itself – longer than the marathon and much less gripping on a spectator level.
Ruins it for you, doesn’t it?
The Americans brought out four-time discus gold medalist Al Oerter to bring the flame into the Atlanta Games in 1996. Oerter handed off the flame to bronze medal boxer Evander Holyfield, who invited Voula Patoulidou, the first Greek female medalist, to join him. Together they ran to four-time gold medal swimmer Janet Evans who took the torch up the long, long ramp. There the music stopped, and over the stadium you heard people calling his name: Muhammad Ali.
Pretty dramatic stuff. Especially when you wondered if that remote line rig was going to work.
For some reason my memories of the Sydney Games are a bit dimmer, but it is visually arresting still. Herb Elliot, an Australian gold winner in track and field brought the flame in. These Olympics celebrated the 100th anniversary of female competition, and so a host of Australia’s female medalists carried the flame around: Betty Cuthbert, Raelene Boyle, Dawn Fraser, Shirley Strickland, Shane Gould and Debbie Flintoff-King. Finally it came to a young woman, Australian aboriginal runner Cathy Freeman, who wore a white body suit and ran up flights of white stairs, through an orchestra and then walked on water. She lit the water at her feet, which burned in a circle and then rose above her. Now we’re just letting the engineers show off:
And that makes it less interesting, really. By the time that Greece rolled around in 2004 there was a wire walker flying through the air, and then two more, floating above the Olympians. They pantomimed a long running stride, which allowed NBC to take a commercial break. (You just come to loathe NBC after a while, don’t you? I’m sure every other network in every other country took that break, too. The Games had long since become a television program.)
Nikos Galis, a prominent Greek basketball player started the final stage of the torch run. We learned that Pele, Nelson Mandela and even Tom Cruise (OMG!) has carried this torch. Do you think these guys use a good anti-bacterial soap after the honor of carrying the torch? So many people handle the torch — and even Tom Cruise! — that’s just an invitation for a cold.
The Greek torch was a handsome one though. Not overdone, just right.
Galis dished to Mimis Domazos, a famous Greek soccer player from the 1960s. Then came hurdles champion Voula Patoulidou. (Surely making her one of the few people who’ve carried the flame in more than one Olympics.) She passed the torch to weightlifting medalist Kakhi Kakhiashvili and he delivered it to Ioannis Melissanidis, the 1996 floor exercise champion in men’s gymnastics. Finally the flame found Nikolaos Kaklamanakis, a gold medalist in sailing.
He … well, let’s let the dispassionate voice of Wikipedia tell the tale:
The torch was finally passed to the 1996 Olympic sailing champion Nikolaos Kaklamanakis, who lit a giant cigar-shaped tapered column resembling a torch — not, as usual, a cauldron — to burn during the duration of the 2004 Summer Olympics. As Kaklamanakis ascended the steps to light the cauldron, the cauldron seemed to bow down to him, symbolizing that despite advance of technology, technology is still a creation and tool of humanity and that it was meant to serve humanity’s needs. The ceremony concluded with a breathtaking fireworks display.
Seemed … symbolizing … breathtaking … That’s good editorial tone. Also the writer of that passage seems to think that tech still works for us. How quaint.
More wires at the Beijing Games. And there was a children’s chorus singing things that may or may not have been words. Seven of China’s most respected Olympic medalists ran the torch around the outside of the stadium and ultimately the final honor fell to Li Ning, the country’s biggest winner at their first Olympics, in 1984.
And at the end, it just looked like that occasional firework with the impossibly fast fuse: a terrifyingly good idea that could have gone either way:
Li Ning probably had the worst view for the footage of those previous torch relays, which was perhaps the nicest touch of the show. Maybe it was that feedback or perhaps it was some other reason, but the air walking trend has at least been halted.
Let the people run, we say.
We also agreed that the Barcelona lighting was the best. But now that I recall there were shenanigans I might have to return to the 1984 and 1996 Games for my favorite piece of Olympic theater. That’s probably just an American bias, though.
