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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Every Olympics is a miniature world -- and leaves you feeling more hopeful about the human race than you were before.
By Gary Kamiya
Read more: Sports, Media, Olympics, TV, China, Tibet, San Francisco, Gary Kamiya, Opinion
Reuters / Kin Cheung
Germany's Olympic champion Tomasz Wylenzek (right) cries as he stands by Christian Gille after their gold medal win in the men's C2 1000 meters finals at the Athens 2004 Olympic Games.
Aug. 5, 2008 | As you know unless you have renounced all contact with the outside world, the Olympics start this Friday in Beijing. I'm going to be blogging on them from San Francisco, joining fellow couch potatoes King Kaufman and Jennifer Sey, and John Krich, who will be in China. I'm looking forward to having a permanently hosted bar and grill conveniently located 10 feet away from my supine viewing position, but I'm pretty envious of John. I've covered three Olympics for Salon -- the 1998 winter games in Nagano, Japan, and the 2000 and 2004 summer games in Sydney, Australia, and Athens, Greece -- and once you've been to one, you tend to get addicted. I now understand those junkies you see at every games, obsessive souls completely covered with Olympics pins going back to 1960 Rome who will pull you aside to discourse for hours on the comparative merits of the shuttle buses in Atlanta and Torino.
The atmosphere at an Olympics is hard to describe. Those two-plus weeks are a crazy festival of excess -- too many sports, too much drama, too much nationalism, too much internationalism, too many people from too many countries, too much boorish cheering, too much great sportsmanship, too much athletic perfection, too many emotional highs and lows. For a journalist, add the excess of an insane work schedule, coming back from far-flung venues and trying to write 2,000-word stories before you collapse at 3 a.m. And while you're figuring out bus schedules and watching heats and buying tickets from scalpers and grabbing bites to eat, all the time there's a champagne buzz in the air, amazing things are being done that you're not even aware of and there are people from all over the world packed into one tiny place and there's always someone standing on a platform crying.
Maybe it's the compression of reality that really gets to you. When they light the Olympic flame at the end of the Opening Ceremonies, it's as if the lid has been put on a pressure cooker, and everything that happens for the next two weeks is supercharged. The colors are brighter, the victories and defeats deeper, because you know that flame won't burn forever. The Olympics remind you that life is supposed to feel like this -- intense and short and played for keeps.
I can't deny that watching the games on TV has some huge advantages over being there. Besides the aforementioned open-bar factor, there's infinitely more information. You learn much more about the athletes, you get expert commentary on the sports, you get to see every event, you don't have to deal with the always-maddening logistics. (There's nothing quite like taking an early-morning bus ride through a blizzard into the mountains outside Nagano, only to find out that the event has been canceled. Unless it's doing it twice.) And best of all, you have close-up views of everything, instead of sitting 300 yards away from the action, getting eyestrain from adjusting your binoculars every 30 seconds.
But there are a couple of major disadvantages, and they mostly have to do with that ineffable Olympics vibe. TV tries its best to capture it, and it does a pretty good job, but it ends up feeling a little canned, a little schmalzy. You feel like TV is pulling at your heartstrings, telling you what to think and feel. It's not your Olympics, it's TV's. It's a little like using a guidebook to appreciate a great city -- no matter how good the guidebook is, it imposes a filter. You have to fight to claim your own experience.
I have to say that for me, watching the Olympics on TV has never been quite the same since Jim McKay left. McKay, who died this June after a long and illustrious career, covered 12 Olympics for ABC. No disrespect to Bob Costas or any of the other fine Olympics announcers, many of whom are probably better informed and more articulate than McKay was. But something felt different when McKay departed. Maybe it was because we really only saw him doing the Olympics and the somehow Olympics-like "Wide World of Sports," so that he was associated with the games in a way no subsequent sportscaster has been. Or maybe it was his persona -- kind, thoroughly decent, even slightly tremulous. His grandfatherly humility meant he never got in the way of the events he was covering. Whatever, McKay wasthe Olympics for me, in the same way that that stately Olympic theme ("dum, dum, dee dum-dum-dum") is.
They are overflowing, the games, in a way that no nexus of cameras, no network coverage no matter how vast, can catch. A few examples out of the endless grab bag of Olympics memories: One hot afternoon in Athens, walking along the mountain bike course during the race, I came upon a rider who was sitting on the ground, next to a woman who had her arms around him. He was crying, his body convulsed with silent sobs. No one else was around. I never found out who he was or what his story was, but I didn't need to. When the hype, the hysteria, the drugs and the commercialism make me want to dismiss the whole thing as a colossal fraud, I think of that unknown athlete, sobbing as his dream died.
And I remember the other side, looking at the expressions on the faces of three different athletes as they stood on the medal platform in Sydney. These were not faces you see every day, or every year. They were faces from which everything inessential had been stripped. Faces that you might see on Greek statues.
For each Olympics is a miniature world, a vast novel. You never know what the story line will be, who will emerge as the hero or the villain or the world-class diva, what tragic events or ludicrous intervals will take place. You only know that you'll leave feeling more hopeful about the human race than you were before.
