Forget politics, it’s the athletes who make the Games special
OF COURSE, it’s all doves and hugs until the angry chap in the north fancies his next rocket show. But that’s what hope is for and no one smears it on quite like the folk of the International Olympic Committee.
Last night’s opening ceremony was covered in the stuff. The North, the South, the symbolism of two warring Koreas together after seven decades of segregation and just getting along. Build bridges over the 38th parallel with ice hockey, and all that.
That is not to sound overly cynical — there was a handshake between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korea’s ceremonial head of state Kim Yong-nam, and that, according to those who truly know these things, was meaningful. A tick for the Olympics where other channels of diplomacy have fallen short, then.
But it is important to remember that too much sugar is bad for you and the IOC’s presentation of its role in a peaceful future was, predictably, just a touch sweet.
They merged two illuminated doves into one, paraded athletes of the two nations together on a lap of the Olympic Stadium, delivered a local rendition of John Lennon’s
Imagine, and offered words of reconciliation through Thomas Bach, the Supreme Leader of all he surveys at the IOC.
He talked of ‘unifying power’, that ‘united in our diversity, we are stronger than all the forces that want to divide us’, and of ‘sending a powerful message of peace to the world’.
Noble feelings from a man who seems the sort to obsess in his downtime about the feel of a Nobel Prize. But they were also words that did not seem too mindful of footage from one day earlier, showing Kim Jong-un 180 miles north at a parade of his troops and his biggest missiles. Hopefully he’s an ice hockey fan and the joint women’s team do well.
With that in mind, arguably the most sensible words on the subject came yesterday morning from Sir Hugh Robertson, chairman of the British Olympic Association. ‘You want to be careful of overclaiming about this,’ he said. ‘It’s great that for the Games there has been rapprochement. If this is part of a series of small steps to increase dialogue between the two Koreas, that’s great.
‘But I would always be cautious about over-claiming. People watch sport for great sporting moments, not because of what it’s contributing to international diplomacy.’
And that seems about right. Rather than packaging the Olympics as a vehicle for world peace, it should be about the athletes and their quirky tales.
It should be about the Nigerian bobsleigh team; about Pita Taufatofua, the Tongan who turned up half naked to the Rio Olympics opening ceremony when he was a taekwondo fighter and then did it again in freezing Pyeongchang last night as a cross-country skier; about Lindsey Vonn and her tears for her late grandfather; about Darya Domracheva, the threetime Olympic champion biathlete from Belarus who was inadvertently outed in 2016 as a lieutenant in the KGB; about lunatic ski jumpers; about Britain’s Elise Christie winning in a country where a few hundred wished her dead four years ago.
On a Team GB level, it is about proving that clever investment of Lottery proceeds can compensate for our lack of natural advantages when it comes to snow and ice games. Precisely £28,353,135 has been spent with the minimum aim of winning four medals and tying the record haul from Sochi 2014. Taking 10 is the pipe dream they think is possible.
Is there an argument that £5.6m is way too much to spend on four years of a curling programme, and that there is a limit to how much healthy living might be inspired by the success of Eve Muirhead? Probably. Will those legacy debates cross the mind if Muirhead has a stone to win gold two weeks on Sunday? You would hope not.
And for that reason the Olympics will always be special in summer and winter. It really does not need a committee with grandiose claims.