Here’s a question for all the armchair meteorologists out there: In the usual order of things, doesn’t salt spoil snow and ice?
That perhaps naive inquiry notwithstanding, this weekend saw the beginning of the Winter Olympic Games from Salt Lake City, the latest quadrennial attempt to turn the bane of wintertime commuters into rousing international spectacle and enriching international endorsement opportunity.
Over 2 1/2 frigid weeks, the world will see a massive event based on the simple ability of snow and ice to reduce friction, a happening that, rather charmingly, continues to insist curling is a sport rather than routine maintenance.
With the obligatory curling crack now out of the way, it must also be said that, getting back to salt, the Utah host city is doing a fine job keeping its defining condiment a respectful distance from the assorted rinks and hills. And its dinner-table companion has shown up only in the insistence by NBC’s dopey moguls skiing announcers on overusing a Canadian competitor’s nickname, “L’il Pepper.”
They’re also the ones who wanted to give Ms. Pepper “props” and said, with full exclamation points, that she is “18 and ready to rock.” Dudes!
But talking about actual sport and the telecasting thereof is getting ahead of things. This is, after all, the Olympics, which means that there will be at least as much ancillary bluster as there is athletic bravado. Witness, for instance, the fact of Sting in a key role during Friday night’s Opening Ceremony — although his lovely acoustic song about human fragility managed to transcend the singer’s usual self-importance.
There was skiing and skating aplenty on Saturday and Sunday, of course, but the weekend’s key event was the Opening Ceremony, an intermittently stirring spectacle that planners thoughtfully loaded with opportunities for viewers to take bathroom breaks, watch “Dark Angel,” play chess, etc.
Raise your hand if you, too, had a nightmare later involving the Child of Light, square-dancing and a public-address announcer over-explaining a self-evident allegory on ice.
Still, that unhurried event managed to transmit at least one inspirational message in its parade of nations and coming together of the world for a display of sportsmanship and harmony.
That message: Any schmo with legs can be an Olympic bobsledder or, as the apparent official spelling would have it, “bobsleigher.” Prince “It’s My Sled” Albert of Monaco is an Olympic bobsledder, we learned, and you could pretty much bet that when a country had only a few athletes on hand, it was because of their ability to push a vehicle toward a hill and then jump in.
The parade surprised on several fronts: France did not come out carrying a white flag, for instance, and — embarrassing moment of U.S. geography ignorance — the crowd cheered lustily, patriotically, for Georgia, apparently thinking the state now had an Olympic team.
Bob Costas and Katie Couric knew better, of course. They never hesitated to share just how much they knew. Having that duo handle the broadcast’s hosting duties was like being transported back to a high school student-council meeting, a festival of information-packed perk, although Costas redeemed himself by daring to, if not mock, at least tweak the whole Child of Light spectacle: “Things not going so well right now for the Child of Light,” he said, in one almost-snide comment.
Couric, meanwhile, went the other way, taking every opportunity to maudlinize things. She used her sad-Katie voice to jam in inappropriate plugs for research efforts and mentions of a Hungarian bobsledder’s breast cancer and Olympic flame-bearer Scott Hamilton’s testicular cancer.
Doesn’t she understand that the Olympics are not about overcoming disease, no matter how hard NBC has tried over the years to make them so? They’re about jingoism, darn it.
And there the network was seen casting aside, even before the ceremony began, its ritual meaningless pre-Olympic pledge of impartiality. As Chicago R&B singer R. Kelly lip-synced a sappy song, NBC’s montage of past Winter Olympic highlights showed what seemed to be only American moments.
The power of a pagan symbol like fire, of beautiful music, of a tattered flag representing a wounded nation, runs far deeper than any of our reflexive, big-event, media-culture skepticism.
When Mike Eruzione and his 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey teammates lit the torch, the Olympics became something pure and thrilling again, brighter than blood doping or bribery scandals, bolder than concerns about what havoc the world’s dispossessed might try to wreak, and bigger than one television network’s earnest and often expert but sometimes bumbling coverage attempts.
That same kind of spine tingle happened again on Saturday afternoon, watching the start of the first event NBC chose to televise, a cross-country skiing race. The Olympics, the actual in-the-flesh Olympics, were on. Let the Games begin, in all their excess and sideshow silliness, to try to widen a world’s narrowed, suspicious eyes.
