Secrets of the Olympic Ceremonies. Myles Garcia
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pre-Games event sets the tone for the grand athletic competition to follow more so than the opening ceremony. As Peter Ueberroth, the man behind the uber-successful 1984 Los Angeles Games, imparted to his Ceremonies producer, David Wolper: “A good Opening will set the tone for the Games that follow. Give me a twenty-goose-bump Opening!” And that has sort of has been the unspoken mantra of every Olympic Games, summer and winter, ever since (and at $3,727 a pop for a London 2012 “AA” seat, I’m sure that’ll give your pocket more than just twenty goose-bumps).
Obviously, ceremonies have always fascinated me. Time and again, I hear from people who have watched their first Olympic opening ceremony: Did you see that? Wow, how did they do that? And when I mention that I worked/participated in two of them, I get a quizzical look that borders on being in the presence of a beatified entity or an amiable freak. (I would hope it’s the former). In any case, an Olympic opening ceremony is such a unique phenomenon… not only presaging the main athletic tournament that follows but because it serves no known altruistic or earthly purpose other than to wow the interested spectator or budding Olympo-phile.
Similarly, many have asked: what are the Opening ceremonies for? The ceremonies are not there to feature a particular artist or to even make money. On that one night, some 10-15,000 wannabee performers put on their best spats and spangles, ready to perform before the world; another 10,000, the cream of the world’s athletes, have similarly gathered and donned their most stylish uniforms; and another 80,000 people have paid top ducats for a monster four-hour show. Seven years’ efforts all lead up to this one night. A whole country will literally come to a stop as it struts its stuff under the global microscope--and with them, some 2.5 billion fellow earthlings will also stop whatever they are doing to watch and help celebrate that one evening of unparalleled pomp and pageantry. Put simply, it is a great way to announce to one and all that a very important event is about to happen. And it is truly a magnificent game of oneupsmanship of an almost perverse and unimaginable scale.
Scope and Tone of the book: I tried to write for both the newcomer and the die-hard aficionado insofar as the tone of the book, and I hope to have struck a happy balance. As for scope, if it appears that the book is top-heavy with the Los Angeles, Atlanta, Athens and Beijing chapters, that is because those Games were not only true milestones in tracking the development of the genre, but from a more practical point of view, their ceremonies also had the greatest coverage, and thus the most material available from both regular sources as well as the internet. I have also used the European system of dating in an attempt to conform to the way the International Olympic Committee dates their events and documents. Nearly all games previous to Moscow 1980 had very traditional ceremonies, heavy on the protocol sections and sprinkled with the usual amounts of native folk dances and balloons. Also, being an artistic critique and historical reference book, this volume enumerates as many “firsts” and other “superlative records” as the author could possibly compile.
And finally, I want to again stress that due to the more stringent eBook formatting limitations, I have had to leave out more than 140 images (many of them in color and original schematics from some of the Ceremonies) and numerous tables (like, for example, the full listing of international artists who have performed at Olympic ceremonies, fuller tables of the Budget and OC ticket costs, the trivia questions, or the full list of the athletes lighting the cauldron and torch statistics). This is a leaner, more pared down book--not by the author’s choice. Of course, the fuller, more lavish soft cover version is recommended and available also. Or you could ask your local library to purchase it (they’ll get a 20% discount if purchased directly from the book’s website).
Viewable Past Ceremonies. Most of the past ceremonies discussed in this book are viewable in one or all sections on two sites: (i) highlights and portions can be found on the IOC website (www.olympic.org) or (ii) on that wonderful window to past and private lives, YouTube. Warning: sometimes the guardians of the IOC or whichever licensing organization it works with, are on caffeine-overload so they will take down those YouTube clips no sooner than you can utter the magic words Citius, Altius, Expialidocious.
Chapter TWO
The Socialist Sports Machines
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From the Spartakiades to the Arirangs
Games, festivals, mass celebrations have been used and misused throughout history by both democratic and despotic governments. The socialist Proletariat Games and the 1936 Olympic Games of Berlin are the forerunners of today’s massive, lavish, Olympic and like ceremonies. Mounted by the Soviet-bloc, Nazi and Mao Zedong regimes, the socialist aura to those games is still very much alive in one of the last totalitarian regimes left in the world, in North Korea’s Arirang Games.
Shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1918, and then spread their socialist ideology to other countries, the use of mass gymnastic displays to further socialist ideals was not far behind.
On 23 July 1921, the Bolsheviks organized the “International Association of Red Sports and Gymnastics Associations” (later known in short as “RSI” or Red Sport International) in Moscow to promote communist-based sports and gymnastics. RSI was created to steer worker sports organizations around the world away from the rival Lucerne-based Sport International, and as the emerging communist world’s answer to the aristocracy/royalty-dominated, Lausanne-based International Olympic Committee.
Start of Communist kitsch. In October 1922, Czechoslovakia’s communist sports federation became the first foreign chapter to join the new organization, followed shortly by the similar federations of France (1923) and Norway (1924). However, it was not until the RSI’s Fifth World Congress in the fall of 1924 that RSI was officially recognized by the Comintern. By that time, the Sportintern had become primarily an instrument of the Young Communist International, the youth wing of Comintern. Other chapters in North, South America and Europe quickly followed suit. And in August 1928, the RSI held its first Spartakiade in Moscow. By the end of the 1920s, even with branches in three continents, the RSI was disbanded by the Comintern in April 1937, the eve of World War 2. However, for some reason, the Czech Republic chapter remained very active in putting on the Spartakiades after the war, and kept meticulous records of those events from its communist era.
Gymnasts as far as the eye could see-- Velky Strahovsky Stadium, Prague, Czechoslovakia, 1955.
Some positively mind-numbing communist-era Czech Spartakiade statistics (note: the massive participating gymnastic numbers are on a national basis rather than just for the Prague-based events):
•The Velky Strahovsky Stadium in Prague, of course, fulfilled all the bombastic superlatives that the former socialist regimes so loved to spout. The playing field, surrounded by seating on all sides, is 63,500 sqm (nearly 6.5 hectares or eight football pitches in size). The stadium has seen as many as 230,000 spectators recorded at the 1967 Spartakiade. Today, it is the largest stadium in the world today no longer in use for sports purposes. (Only the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is larger, with a seating capacity of more than 250,000—but that is for motorized sport.)
•In 1955, over half a million gymnasts took part in the first national Spartakiade (photo above) held on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the liberation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Army—so members of the all-high Moscow Politburo were in attendance.
•In 1960, more than two million spectators viewed two four-programme cycles of Spartakiade performances at Prague’s Strahov stadium.
•In 1965, 1,365,514 gymnasts performed in 410 district and county Spartakiades across Czechoslovakia.
•Ten years later, the summer 1975 Spartakiades nationwide saw that number double to a recorded participation of 2,714,666 gymnasts all across the country.
•In 1990, more than 800,000 trainees participated in learning seventeen different displays.
Old Habits Die Hard. After Czechoslovakia split into two nations in 1993 and as late