Russia up 1-0 on the first day
SOCHI, Russia — What the opening of the 2014 Winter Olympics showed is that Canada and Russia are closer than you might have thought possible.
The great cauldron that will burn for the duration of the Sochi Games was lit here Friday night by a Hockey Hall of Fame goalie, three-time Soviet team gold medallist Vladislav Tretiak, and Irina Rodnina, another three-time Olympic champion in pairs figure skating.
Hockey and figure skating: Loved in similar proportions by both the host country of these Olympics, and the one that played host to the last gathering of the world’s greatest winter athletes.
At the end of an opening ceremony illuminated by the colourful lighting that has been designed to accentuate the positive of Sochi — or more properly Adler — at night, and especially its spectacular Olympic Park, the two enduring heroes of the host country’s sporting past capped an evening of rapturous classical music, ballet and often powerful images from Russia’s very serious history.
Tretiak and Rodnina ended a torch relay that included wrestling legend Alexander Karelin and tennis star Maria Sharapova, who carried the flame into Fisht Stadium on a cool, breezy night on the shores of the Black Sea.
And if the evening’s first star was Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, whose soaring music from Swan Lake made multiple appearances in the elaborate production, the ceremony was also notable for the brief, scripted sentence spoken by these Olympics’ most influential mover, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who declared the Games open and then stepped away from the microphone, a bit player in the protocol.
The sigh of relief from Vancouver could be felt on the exact opposite side of planet Earth when a key element in the opening ceremony failed to deploy.
Like the malfunctioning fourth mechanical leg of the Olympic cauldron at the 2010 opening, for which Canada’s host city was widely mocked, the Russian ceremony’s five-ring depiction of the iconic Olympic logo — meant to be snowflakes, two from the south and three from the north that morphed into a giant white symbol of the modern Games — stalled here Friday night, after four became rings and the stubborn fifth, on the upper right side, remained frozen.
Sochi had none of the heartbreak of Vancouver’s opening to overcome; no young Georgian luger’s life was snuffed out in a horrible accident on the day of the opening; and yet there was little chance that the opening of the Games would be a light-hearted romp through Russian history, or anything like the often whimsical, self-deprecating, campy show in London two years ago.
The ceremony also had nothing quite as eye-popping as the snowboarder bursting through the flaming rings at B.C. Place Stadium, or as plaintive as k.d. lang’s haunting Hallelujah, but it succeeded in the most important respect: It was over on time.
The organizers’ intention was to move the march of the athletes briskly through the obligatory parade of nations and into their respective positions in the stands.
But the concept sketched out by celebrated screenwriter Konstantin Ernst, the ceremony’s artistic director — a sort of Google Earth zeroing in on the athletes’ country of the origin, out of which they would march — instead looked like people parading out of a vague brown mass, each map looking pretty much like the one before.
Still, Tretiak didn’t have to ride to his destination in the back of a pickup truck, in the rain, as Wayne Gretzky did four years ago.
So the Russians are up 1-0, at the end of the first.