SUSPEND DISBELIEF,
ALL YE WHO ENTER THESE GAMES
In a wonderfully intimate little stadium, the long and bitterly divided Koreas fleetingly united in the name of the Olympic Games Friday night.
A handful of athletes from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — like many communist countries of old with similar names, it is anything but democratic — marched under the unification flag with the much larger contingent from the genuine Republic of South Korea, all of them dressed in white and practically jumping out of their skins with excitement.
Watching them from up in the VIP section was South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Kim Yo-jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and the first member of the North’s ruling family to visit the South since fighting in the Korean War ended in 1953 — and Mike Pence, the vice-president of the United States, who was accompanied by his wife, Karen, and thus in a “safe space, ” protected from local temptresses attempting to woo him to lunch.
There was even an appearance by a Donald Trump fake, a fellow wearing a Trump disguise who caused a brief stir and nearstampede in the media section of the stands.
The real article, of course, has been famously engaged in a war of words with Kim, who for his part has been testing his nukes and missiles with abandon, and who for good measure held a huge military parade far ahead of its regular scheduled date just this week.
It was the first time in 11 years, since the Asian Winter Games, that athletes from the two Koreas have marched under a single flag.
But if the prospects for peace last no longer than the 16 days of the Pyeongchang Games, they nonetheless made for a powerful and touching symbol of possibility, of what might be.
And the Olympics, despite a plethora of well-documented failures and weaknesses — not to mention the exorbitant costs of staging them, are all about symbolism and the power of magical thinking. What else, and this is just the starter, could propel about 30,000 people to sit in freezing temperatures and biting wind for three hours? And those were the three hours before the two-hour event actually started.
The ceremony itself was an unusual mix of old and modern Korea, with traditional dancers, janggo drummers and singers mixing it up with high-tech wizardry and the sounds of K-pop, including the familiar notes (from 2012) of pop singer Psy’s Gangnam Style.
As ever, children were at the centre of the show, with five gorgeous kids — one for each Olympic ring — travelling through the “Land of Peace,” where animals and people live in perfect harmony, through to the future, where in the IT powerhouse that is the modern south, again every living thing will be in harmony with every other.
Light was everywhere, in the form of thousands of candles, lanterns, lit Olympic rings, astonishing fireworks — and always representing perfect unity.
(Opening ceremonies, for journalists, invariably come with unbearably lengthy written explanations for every artistic nuance of every moment, for example, the drums express “the life force,” the buckwheat blossoms show “the spirit of defiance of Koreans,” etc. This is a good thing, because journalists are insensitive by occupation, and otherwise would mistake such profound artistic expressions as just a good party.)
And it was a good party, the hosts with their lovely mannerliness and ever-present good humour, the guests so ready to be charmed they were bowing like birds on the hunt.
The setting was utterly gorgeous, the glittering little purpose-built stadium, as a backdrop the dark treed mountains that cover so much of this magnificent country, dozens of national flags fluttering along the river and finally, a sense that there is a Pyeongchang, a there here.
The three representatives from Bermuda (only one is an actual athlete) daringly wore bright red shorts and black knee socks. The preposterously handsome Pita Taufatofua, the cross-country skier from Tonga, one-upped them and arrived shirtless.
Crowds cheered boisterously at the sight of their flags, and even the contingent of Olympic athletes from Russia, their country in the doping doghouse, were greeted with warm applause. Everyone loves someone.
Just before the lighting of the Olympic torch — it was lit by Olympic champion figure skater Yuna Kim, but handed to her by two female hockey players, South Korea’s Park Jong-ah and North Korea’s Jong Su Hyon — four Korean singers did a beautiful version of the unofficial peace anthem, John Lennon’s Imagine.
The crowd, every man and woman with a torch, swayed back and forth to the music; it was like a rolling wave of light.
As the singers sang the second stanza — “Imagine there’s no countries / It isn’t hard to do / Nothing to kill or die for / And no religion too” — there wasn’t a dry eye or untouched heart in the house — or the tiniest shard of recognition or a sliver of irony.
That’s the true spirit of the Olympics: Suspended disbelief.