Special Correspondent: Olympics Opening Ceremony

Posted by sara August 8th, 2008 at 11:47am In The Olympics

[Ed. Note: Please welcome Friend of the Faux Sara who's here to talk to us about things we know little about. Namely, sport. The Olympics. They're happening, did you hear?]

In honor of Friday’s opening ceremonies, here’s a look back at some notable moments from the past four summer Games, starting with the one that got me stuck. (For thoughts on the Winter Olympics, check this space in 2010, when we will discuss Kristi Yamaguchi and her enormous influence on my concept of womanhood.)

1992:

I was not what you might call a sporty girl. By the time I was 11, I’d played two seasons of soccer, badly, in an attempt to get my dad’s attention, and I was still a couple of years away from playing softball, badly, in an attempt to get my dad’s attention. The summer after sixth grade my aunt offered me a trip to Seattle with her to visit her sister’s family; my uncle worked for Boeing and they had a mob of blond, athletic children, including my feral cousin Becky. Our trip, the first time I ever saw a plane fly directly into the sunset, coincided with the Summer Olympics in Barcelona, and my aunt and uncle let us all stay up till midnight every night watching the coverage. This is the strongest image I, and I suppose many other people, associate with those Games:

It was a glorious fortnight that launched my obsession with the Olympics, now sixteen years strong (good God, I’m old). The opening ceremonies that year featured paralympic archer Antonio Rebollo lighting the Olympic cauldron with a flaming arrow, a spine-chillingly glorious moment even by my very low standards:

1996:
In which the ugly Americans embarrass themselves. Some of y’all might recall that the Atlanta Olympics took place during a disgusting heat wave characteristic of August in Georgia; as a result, everyone at the opening ceremonies looked damp and irritated. 1996 was also the first year that NBC had the exclusive broadcast rights, and even though they could have broadcast much of the Games in primetime, at least on the East Coast, the network chose to package content that happened during the day and air it late into the evening. Kerri Strug’s supposedly gold medal–winning vault, for instance, took place around two in the afternoon and was not the last event of the team gymnastics competition. It didn’t air until 11:45 that night, at which time the commentators had been hyping it like the second coming of Christ for almost four hours. (And in fact, the U.S. team didn’t need her second vault to win gold, although none of the gymnasts and few of the coaches knew that at the time; the Russian team also had not finished competing and would not achieve the scores necessary to overcome Strug’s first vault. I bet she thinks of that whenever it rains and that surgically repaired ankle starts to throb.)

The opening ceremonies featured a teary procession of the Olympic flame, culminating with Muhammad Ali, who was awarded a replacement for his 1960 gold medal in boxing, which he famously threw into the Ohio River after being denied service at a restaurant. The ceremony also featured a segment called “Traditions of the South,” which luckily featured a small hoedown, a drumline, step dancing, and a parade of Chevys rather than uglier traditions like denying people service in restaurants and RC Cola. This part actually looks a little like a high school football game I might have attended, only with more fluorescent uniforms.

My favorite part is how horrified the CBC announcers sound about the prospect of the crowd doing the Wave. At the Olympics. And then there was the part where the band spelled out “How You Doin’,” which is a little odd, since these Olympics didn’t take place in Queens.

2000:

The Sydney Olympics started on September 15, since it was actually spring in Australia. Their opening ceremony, like Atlanta, featured some righting of wrongs in the person of Cathy Freeman, an Aboriginal sprinter who won a silver medal in Atlanta and then a gold in Sydney. The ceremony’s nod to Australian culture included a sheep muster set to the theme from The Man From Snowy River. Nope, not kidding. I suppose it’s the Australian equivalent of Chevys and step dancing, only with horses.

I watched this ceremony with a dormful of strangers early in my sophomore year of college, but missed a lot of the Games since I had to go to school and all, and since the Games were entirely tape-delayed on account of being fourteen hours ahead of us.

2004:
The opening ceremonies in Athens were notably insane, since the Greeks decided it would be a good idea to have a Dutch DJ playing house music throughout the Parade of Nations. I really would have enjoyed hearing that decision-making process, mainly because I never knew the Greeks had such a strong tradition of techno.

The Athens ceremony featured some tasteful, traditional nudity, which none of us watching on NBC saw, as the network politely censored all the naughty bits in the wake of Nipplegate and the reliably touchy FCC. Luckily, the BBC is down with (fake!) frontal nudity (about 4:30 in):

2008:
Tomorrow’s ceremony promises to be the most enormous yet; the Chinese have, obviously, many more people to draw on and seem to be willing to spend any amount of money to impress the visiting dignitaries. But if the ceremony, like the one in Athens, features a visual recreation of the entirety of Chinese history, we’re going to be in front of our TVs all night. I took a class on that once and it took us a whole semester just to get up to 1600! And I don’t even want to know how they’ll act out the Cultural Revolution.