Fire and ice is always cool. Fire shooting out of space-age helmets, even cooler. You can never go wrong quoting Dante in Italy, or with Venus rising (especially when portrayed by that Wonderbra goddess Eva Herzigova). And both the red Ferrari and Sophia Loren are truly timeless. But Yoko Ono channeling her late husband's "Imagine"? And whose idea was it to have athletes enter the Olympic realm to the pedestrian rhythms of "Funkytown"?
But so it always goes with this extraordinary Olympic ritual of opening ceremonies--a five-ring circus of high art, higher pretensions and that great leavener, schlock. And sometimes it's difficult to distinguish which is which. The International Olympic Committee and organizers of Torino 2006 had begun to fret that the motto of these Games--"Passion lives here"-- was bordering on parody as the world, even the host city, greeted the Olympic run-up with a collective indifference. Didn't we just have one of those? (In fact, yes, 18 months ago in Athens.) Can we expect Americans to get pumped amid a ceaseless bombardment of megacontests and award shows when a mere weekly episode of "24" is now billed as an "event"?
In a world where sending in the troops is so often the first option, here they send in the athletes. So we might as well settle in for a 17-day respite, a welcome change of pace in a world that IOC president Jacques Rogge told the Olympic Stadium assemblage "is in need of peace, tolerance and brotherhood." Some 190 countries have acceded to Italy's request, signing on for an Olympic truce.
Oh, sure, along with the lofty ideals, the usual blemishes quickly became conspicuous last week. American skeleton slider Zach Lund was sent home for taking an antibaldness medication that can mask drug use, even if one glance under Lund's hat revealed cosmetics to be his true purpose. A bunch of cross-country skiers were sidelined "for their health" when tests revealed high hemoglobin levels, a possible indication of illegal doping. And hockey legend Wayne Gretzky was still Torino-bound, raising the possibility that he would bring along an escalating U.S. gambling scandal that has ensnared his wife and his top coaching assistant with the Phoenix Coyotes.
Less than 12 hours after the celebrants exited the stadium, Nordic skiers were flying off the 90-meter jump. Later in the day, they were joined in competition by biathletes, freestyle mogulmasters and both speed and figure skaters. The Games had begun--and begun to apply their gold, silver and bronze balm.
