According to Kirsty Coventry, what we are about to see over the next fortnight of going downhill very fast at the Winter Olympics, is “what it means to care for each other, respect one another, we will see that strength is about empathy and heart.”
We will see demonstrated, the head of the International Olympic Committee insisted as she addressed the opening ceremony of the Milan-Cortina iteration, that “our strength comes from how we treat each other. That is the magic of the Olympic Games.”
Incidentally, this is the same Coventry who has just declared that Russia, currently engaged in the process of murderous infiltration of another land, should be invited back into the Olympic fold. Still, at least, as heads of sporting institutions go, she is not Gianni Infantino.
In many ways, though, that is typical of the Olympic way: pretending it is all about harmony and love when we really know it is all about money and the projection of power. And in Milan, the BBC was more than happy to embrace such fallacy.
“What a scene setter,” Clare Balding said about Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s short film that introduced the corporation’s broadcast. It was perhaps a brave choice of the Beeb to choose someone to set the tone for their view of the Italian Winter Olympics who is neither Italian nor an Olympian. The geezer can’t even ski.
Meanwhile in the Cortina studio from where the coverage over the next fortnight will come, were stationed a presentational trio of Balding, and former Olympians Lizzy Yarnold and Chemmy Alcott. This suggested that, at least as far as the BBC is concerned, there are seemingly no men involved in these Games.
Though, to be fair, there was a bloke to the helm for the ceremony itself. Indeed the BBC had chosen more than wisely in its commentary team. Joining Hazel Irvine behind the microphone was the incomparable racing reporter John Hunt, a man who could use the Olympics’ apparent power to act as a healing balm.
He and Irvine had much to describe. Not least in who was there in the crowd at San Siro. JD Vance was in the pricey seats, while Britain was represented by the unexpected pair of Princess Anne and Lisa Nandy, who was presumably the only available member of the cabinet solely because she has no chance of maneuvering for the Labour leadership.
As it all got underway, Hunt had a good line about the apparent star of the event.
“Shortly we’ll discover Mariah is for life,” he said of Ms Carey, who was about to sing, “not just for Christmas.”
He spoke a bit too soon. All we could see on the screen for what seemed an interminable grind was the kind of wretched interpretive dance that is only ever unleashed at Olympic opening ceremonies.
Eventually, on came Carey, dressed as a meringue, singing Volare, the tune that won Italy the 1958 Eurovision Song Contest. She struggled to reach the high notes before demonstrating her diva credentials by being carried off the stage. The most pressing thought, though, was that rarely can such a storied artistic heritage as that of the host nation have been so blandly represented as it was here.
“A musical dialogue between the mountains and the city,” Irvine then told us, as some bloke with a Stradivarius played while dancers in cast-off military greatcoats shimmied round him. That she managed to do so while not adopting a Graham-Norton-at-Eurovision smirk was yet further testament to her sterling professionalism.
Though you wonder whether she might finally have succumbed to the Norton methodology when she told us that, as a reward for winning a medal, Filipino athletes have been promised free colonoscopies for life.
This was the first opening ceremony in Olympic history to split its athletes parade into four different centres, places closest to where the competitors were performing. It made it all a little disjointed. As for what everyone wore, some – like the Danes walking into the Milanese stadium in determinedly beige anoraks – barely reflected the fact they were in the capital of the fashion world. Others, like the Colombians, wearing jackets apparently inspired by Arsenal’s 1991 acid dream away shirts, at least made the effort. As did Team GB in jumpers seemingly made out of union flags rescued from the lampposts of your nearest roundabout.
Disappointingly for those interested in new methods of pharmaceutical enhancement, the ski jumpers in the athletes parade were too wrapped up in cold weather gear to allow any close inspection of how many had benefited from an injection in their crotch apparently to improve their wind resistance.
After they had all done their bit (the Ukrainians being cheered to the echo, the Israelis attracting a smattering of boos), the speeches and the flag flourishing came. It was all, as it generally is at such events, entirely underwhelming. Or at least it was until Andrea Bocelli stepped forward to soundtrack the lighting of the Olympic flame with a spine-tingling rendition of Nessun Dorma. Despite at least three hours of attempting not to, in Italy they know how to do some things rather well.
