BEST IN SNOW SAVE THE SHOW
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA— You can’t hold an Olympics without flags. There were 93 countries here in Pyeongchang, and their colours were hung from the rafters and from fields of poles, were brandished like totems and painted on skin. The Olympics are driven by people, but every one is animated by that powerful idea of representing your country.
As the Pyeongchang Olympics close, they exit as a strangely hollow Olympics. The crowds were sparse to middling, unless there were Koreans competing in speedskating or curling, which became a sensation here. There was no buzz, and only spots of spirit. I was on a train with a South Korean athletic official from the closing ceremony of the 2016 Games, and I asked him what he worried about, and he said: “I am worried people will not care.” Whatever the reason — a lack of accommodations, logistics or culture — he was right.
Not enough people did, anyway. They stuck this thing amid dead-dry brown hills and farmers’ fields, a three-hour drive from Seoul, and plunked down arenas and bobsled runs and an Olympic stadium that cost about $200 million and will be used four times before it is demolished. The venues were separate and sterile, and a quarter of them have no post-Games legacy plan. The medal ceremonies were remote, almost invisible.
The volunteers were wonderful, as they usually are. But there was no obvious heart of these Games, no clear centre. Sometimes it felt like there was no there at all.
There was, of course. There always is. As a commercial enterprise, the Olympics are a TV show more than anything anyway, and that meant it was left to the athletes to animate it, more than usual. And they never let you down.
I mean, pick your favourite. For America, Chloe Kim’s 17-year-old luminosity, and her first-generation Korean-born father yelling out, “American dream!” or Adam Rippon, who with Canada’s Eric Radford and American Gus Kenworthy was the fabulous face of the most gayfriendly and proud Winter Games ever. For Korea, its women’s curling team, the Garlic Girls, who became heroes.
There are always too many stories to tell them all, and too many little beautiful moments. God, when Virtue and Moir skated at the gala to the Tragically Hip’s Long Time Running. At the Olympics, it feels like everybody cries.
But you never get tired of what people can do. The athletes are what powers the great creaking superstructure of the Olympics, and then the IOC spent two weeks undercutting that idea. Russia should have been banned for systemic doping, but Russia was here, draped in disguises that weren’t intended to fool anybody.
In the opening IOC session Canada’s Dick Pound, the longest-serving member of the organization, said: “Mr. President, we are in trouble now. We need to make clear to the world that our decisions and actions are based on principles that distinguish the Olympic movement from entertainment sports.”
And then Pound spent two weeks getting castigated and criticized by fellow IOC members, up to and including president Thomas Bach. The prevailing wisdom was clear.
“In the end if you don’t like the coffee, if you don’t like the decor or the prices, you can go to another coffee shop,” said IOC spokesperson Mark Adams. Get on board, Dick. Train’s leaving without you.
But Russia had two of the four positive doping tests during the Games.
The IOC had to find another conscience-free compromise: no flag or colours in the closing ceremony, but reinstatement as an Olympic Committee after that. The Russian antidoping agency remains uncertified by the World Anti-Doping Agency, by the way. And almost at the exact same time the IOC announced its decision, the Washington Post reported the cyberattacks that crippled the Internet during the opening ceremony had been launched by Russian spies, according to U.S. intelligence.
But the IOC reaped $4.16 billion (U.S. )in broadcast revenue for the 2014 and 2016 Games. The IOC is pro sports, which doesn’t really want to catch anybody either, except here the athletes all but pay them.
Canadian luger Sam Edney and his teammates won silver, by the way, and fellow luger Alex Gough won bronze, after being robbed by Russian dopers in Sochi. But world 50-kilometre cross-country cham- pion Alex Harvey finished fourth, and he said: “That’s the hard part. But you want to believe in the new generation of Russians, so you’ve got to give them the benefit of the doubt, for sure.
“But it’s one of the reasons why it’s so hard to be fourth, with two Russians ahead of me, I’m not going to lie.”
Still, the whole thing worked. The norovirus was contained, the buses didn’t vanish, and the corruption was less flagrant than in Sochi or Rio, so it felt like a win. And North Korea attended, raising the prospect of diplomacy, or at least a lowering of the tensions on the peninsula. Maybe the fact that these Olympics were sterile, that they lacked enough heart, was fine.
Jean Lee is a global fellow at the Wilson Center, a prominent and respected non-partisan research think tank; she was the one who negotiated and built the Associated Press bureau in North Korea, and spent three years there during a period of over 10 years between the two Koreas. She attended with her parents, and agrees: there was so little spirit, so little buzz. But she noted: the last two years in Korea have been politically exhausting, with candlelit marches in the streets and an impeachment. The security situation has been worrisome, with posturing between the North Koreans and the United States. It overshadowed everything.
“It’s been peaceful,” says Lee, “but a couple months ago we were talking nuclear war here. And we may again.”
That was the subtext of North Korea at these Games, in a country where you can be arrested for researching or even retweeting the wrong things about that country; the Americans are unstable, and North Korea survives by its own form of diplomacy. So they came, brought their robotic cheerleaders, offered only the third inter-Korean summit between the nations since the war.
But their athletes competed too, and that is where the real glimmers were. The North Korean skier, Kim Ryon Hyang, who said, “I have yet to make friends (from other countries). (But) we’re going to be (friends).” The figure skating pair, Ryom Tae Ok, 18, and the 25-year- old Kim Ju Sik, who trained with Meagan Duhamel and Radford in Montreal. They were lovely kids, by all accounts, and just wanted to skate.
“One of the things I used to do with my North Korean staff was to take them ice skating,” says Lee. “When we let the North Koreans control how we see them, we get the cheerleaders. We get what they get to project. So I had to go and look for opportunities where they weren’t being controlled, and ice skating for me was perfect, because I grew up in Minnesota so I could skate, and they were totally preoccupied with staying on their feet.”
“And you just saw North Koreans acting normally. And they are very normal when you get them away from it all. They’re just as emotional, and they have just as much fun, they’re on their cellphones, they’re taking selfies, they’re falling, and boys are trying to show off. They’re just: you would not know that this is an ice rink in North Korea, because they act like anyone else on an ice rink anywhere else in the world.”
Maybe that was the heart: the tiny connections, the stripping away of propaganda, the moments where the politics and corruption and B.S. faded into the background, and people did incredible, human things. There were a lot of flags here: the unified North Korean flag, the rainbow flag, and the Olympic flag, with Russian ones limited to the crowds. But Mikaela Shiffrin, the American skier who fell short of her ambitious five-medal attempt, summed it up.
“It’s not necessarily the medalists who get the most out of the Olympics,” she wrote on Twitter. “It’s those who are willing to strip down to nothing and bare their soul for their love of the game. That is so much greater than gold, silver, or bronze. We all want a medal, but not everyone will get one. Some are going to leave here feeling like heroes, some will leave heartbroken, and some will have had moments when the felt both — because we care.”
“That is real. That is life. It’s amazing and terrifying and wonderful and brutal and exciting and nervewracking and beautiful. And honestly, I’m just so grateful to be part of that.”
The Olympics are always about the same thing, more or less: it is about people being so much better than the institutions that exploit them, the governments who rule them, the monsters and idiots who rule the world. The higher you go, the more rot you find; down here on the ground you find grace, more than anything, and I’m grateful to be part of that, too.