Bruce Arthur:
The Games were beautiful, the politics not so much. »
There are always two Olympics, at least two, and they are both about what it takes.
Firstly, there is the central engine of the Olympics: the men and women who come from across the world to compete, who win or lose or complete a great voyage just by showing up. They, along with the people who push or pull or carry them, create so many indelible stories. There is nothing like the Olympics.
And these Olympics contained deep beauty. Canada’s women’s hockey triumph, and the mirrored American heartbreak. Jan Hudec’s cardboard knees and bottomless heart. The Dufour- Lapointe sisters, and their fiercely proud parents. All the parents, really.
Athletes adopting stray dogs, and volunteers smuggling them safely out of Sochi. Teemu Selanne’s final Olympic dance for Finland, and fourth medal. Yulia Lipnitskaya’s 15- year- old ferocity and occasional perfection. Gilmore Junio’s brother and sister and parents cheering their hearts out for Denny Morrison; Canadian cross- country coach Justin Wadsworth running out to a Russian with a broken ski, and giving him another. He wanted the Russian to complete the race with dignity, he said. This is his home.
Every Olympics gets you, one way or another. When it was revealed that Sarah Burke’s ashes were brought here, carefully carried around the world and sprinkled on the halfpipe in secret, a ritual and a eulogy, god. It was so easy to cry. That is the Olympics.
And then there is the other Olympics, and that is also a story about what it takes. Every Olympics is political. What was spent, what was prosecuted, what was carried out in its name. During these Games Russia arrested protesters and journalists, and cut off funding for its lone independent TV station. Cossack policemen horsewhipped members of Pussy Riot, the dissident, dissonant punk band that dared to come and protest in Sochi. In Vancouver, we put some of our terrible acts into the closing ceremony.
Sochi’s environmental disregard, its elephantine $ 51- billion budget, the vast corruption, the ongoing prosecution of the LGBT community outside Sochi; they were all part of these Games, too.
The Olympics tries to create a bubble, but the world intercedes. As Russia’s Olympics came to a close, Ukraine’s Russia- backed government, which cracked down on protesters in clashes that killed over 100, fell.
It felt like the old days, but those days are gone. Jaromir Jagr wears No. 68 to commemorate the Prague Spring, the short- lived burst of freedom and liberalization that ended in August 1968 when the Soviet tanks rolled in. Here he said, “It’s not really a big deal now. Almost everybody knew why I am wearing the number. It’s not about the people, it’s about the politics.”
These Games were about the people, and about the politics. The most interesting people to talk to here were volunteers; they came from all over Russia, were mostly young, mostly university students. They are bright, ambitious, worldly, a generation of Russia’s human capital. Wonderful people.
“I was proud of the opening, because it was very beautiful, for Russia,” said Ekaterina, a mechanical engineering student at a Moscow university. “But now, I am not so proud. So much money ( spent) for the Olympics that could be better used on other purposes.
“I don’t think Putin is bad president; in ’ 99 it was worse. Nobody had money. Now, people have money in their pockets. But there are not opportunities to develop — not chance to develop in sport, other places. People don’t think about Russia. People think about themselves. A lot of people think the Olympics will make it worse for Russia.”
The central tension for people who oppose Putin here was that they wanted the Games to succeed for Russians, but if the Games succeeded, Putin would be the main beneficiary. One Moscow- based journalist said she was filled with pride when Russian athletes performed well, because, “In Canada, in United States, the system works for you. In Russia, the system works against you. It’s hard. I am not proud of Russia. I am proud of Russians.”
It’s the same everywhere, I suppose, but the disconnect here — the disconnect between the beauty of the Olympics and the superstructure that the IOC accepted, between the people of Russia and their leaders, between reality and what felt like an enormous slipshod Russian film set, staffed with actors from across the world — was so stark. It contained everything you hate about the Olympics: corruption, white elephants, the blithe acceptance of repression in the name of bringing people together.
And it contained everything you love about the Olympics, too. In the opening ceremony Konstantin Ernst presented a dreamlike vision of this country filled with artists, writers, dancers, grace.
The closing ceremony, too. It was, as one Moscow native put it to me, a Russia without Putin. If only we could have had an Olympics without him, too.