2022 Winter Olympics Closing Ceremonies (International Olympic Committee, NBC-TV, aired February 20, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched the closing ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, China – the first city to host both the Summer Olympics (in 2008) and the Winter Olympics – and it was a surprisingly low-keyed spectacle lasting only an hour and a half, a far cry from the spectacle the organizers of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway did. Given how many of the familiar winter sports were invented by the Scandinavians, especially the Norwegians (skis were a Scandinavian invention and were originally a means of transportation over long distances in the snow: the idea that you could race on them came later), it’s not surprising that Norway led the medal count this year, as they did in 1994 and pretty regularly ever since. The commentators talked a lot about how much of what we were seeing was digital projections rather than real objects, including the huge snowflake that hung over the proceedings, and there was the usual ceremonial handover of the Olympic flag from the mayor of Beijing to the mayors of Milan and Cortina, Italy, which will host the next Winter Olympics in 2026.

The commentators also talked about the political pall over the Olympics, particularly over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s massive military buildup on the border with Ukraine. Throughout the Games I felt sorry for the Ukrainian athletes because they had no way of knowing whether they’d still have a country to come home to when the Olympics were over. Remember that Putin ordered an invasion of Georgia in 2010 while the Winter Olympics were going on in Sochi, Russia, and President Biden ordered the entire staff of the U.S. embassy in Ukraine out of the country in fear of a Russian invasion. Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping have become close geopolitical allies and have made various statements saying that the era of democracy (even limited bourgeois democracy) is over and the future belongs to authoritarians and one-person rule. The last time the leaders of major countries talked that the future lay with dictatorships was during World War II, when the U.S. and Britain essentially cut a deal with the devil by accepting the aid of Left-wing dictator Josef Stalin of Russia to block the more immediate threat of Right-wing dictator Adolf Hitler in Germany.

Speaking of Hitler and the Nazis, it’s amazing how much of the panoply associated with the Olympics today began in 1936, when Germany hosted both the Winter Olympics (in the ski resort town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where Richard Strauss had his villa) and the Summer Olympics (in Berlin). Originally Hitler had planned to turn down the offer to host the Summer Olympics – the bid was made in 1932 when the more or less democratic Weimar Republic was still in power – but his Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels, talked him into letting the games proceed on the ground that they provided a marvelous propaganda opportunity in which the world would see Nazi Germany as just another country, not a nation governed by mass-murdering thugs. The whole business of a worldwide relay race from Greece (site of the ancient Olympics as well as the first revival of the modern games in 1896) to whichever city was hosting that year was born in the fertile minds of Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl, the filmmaking genius Hitler had personally put in charge of directing a documentary about the games. Among the gestures Hitler pulled to make sure the world was on his side and he would see the image of Nazi Germany he wanted them to see was that for the duration of the Olympics he ordered all persecution of the Jews to stop, and he even let one Jewish athlete (a woman swimmer) participate in Germany’s national team. So when I saw a member of the Uighurs, China’s Muslim minority whom the current Chinese government has been accused of targeting for genocide, assigned the honor of lighting the Olympic torch during the opening ceremony, I thought, “Ah, Xi is following Hitler’s playbook.”

In fact, at least partly due to the restrictions imposed by COVID-19 protocols, the modern-day journalists covering the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing were literally encased in a barbed-wire prison, from which they were never allowed either to leave to do person-on-the-street interviews to tell parts of the story representing Chinese reality other than the ones toe government wanted told; or, if they were outside the bubble, they were not allowed to come back in. This dual tension between the Olympics’ stated aim of promoting worldwide brotherhood (and sisterhood: one of the things I like about the Olympics is they essentially treat male and female athletes equally) and peace and the reality that they are often held in dictatorial countries and use them for propagandistic purposes was ironically responded by the use of the “Ode to Joy” finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as part of the closing ceremonies. The Beethoven Ninth has been exploited for political purposes before, and not always positive ones either: there is a famous film of a performance by the Berlin Philharmonic under Wilhelm Furtwängler on April 19, 1942 in which the hall was festooned with swastikas and at least some of the Nazi bigwigs, including Joseph Goebbels, were in the audience. What we hear as an ode to world harmony and peace (so much so that when Leonard Bernstein led a 1989 concert in Berlin to celebrate the tearing down of the Berlin Wall he changed the word in the finale from “Freude” – joy – to “Freiheit,” “freedom”), the Nazis heard as a testament to German culture and its superiority to the rest of the world’s. So it was no real surprise that the Chinese overlords picked this piece of Western music (along with the “Lone Ranger” final theme of Rossini’s William Tell overture, played right after the Italian national anthem to symbolize the transition of the next Winter Olympics from China to Italy) to proclaim the superiority of their system to ours and their destiny to rule the world.

Aside from the politics of the closing ceremony, there was the power and drama of the Winter Olympics themselves, including the fall of Mikaela Shiffrin (she came to Beijing with the burden of NBC’s hype machine, laden with the expectation she would win six medals and she won none; I actually feit sorry for her and exasperated at the way NBC was thrusting its cameras and microphones in her face at each new disappointment) and the rise of Erin Jackson and Elana Meyers-Taylor, who hoped that their medal victories (in speed skating and bobsled, respectively) would inspire future African-Americans to take up winter sports and compete. There was also my newest cultural hero, Timothy LeDuc, who was the first openly non-binary athlete to compete in the Olympics. They (I’m following his preferred gender pronoun here) didn’t win the pairs figure skating competition but they had a good run, and if they didn’t win it was less their fault than the fault of their partner, Ashley Cole-Gribble (who I presume is a cisgender female), who missed her landings on a couple of the big jumps. I won even more admiration for LeDuc when I looked at their Wikipedia page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_LeDuc, and found that their parents had responded to them coming out as Gay (let alone non-binary) by pushing them into “conversion therapy,” but they gradually brought their parents around and now their parents do Queer and Trans Pride events with them. I give NBC’s announcers a lot of credit for calling LeDuc “they” and “them,” even though it wasn’t always clear whether “they” meant LeDuc alone or them and Cole-Gribble as well.