Get on with it. That's what I found myself muttering Friday night during the opening ceremony of the Winter Games.
It was a thrill when Muhammad Ali materialized on the scaffolding in Atlanta and when Cathy Freeman blazed through the night in Sydney.
It was somewhat less of a thrill Friday night when Mike Eruzione and his mates from the US' 1980 Miracle on Ice hockey team materialized to light the caldron, if only because a lot of people had figured they were logical candidates.
But the point was that they were athletes, famous athletes, symbolic athletes, to be sure. The more emphasis on pageantry, the more the athletes become obscured.
Personally, I can't wait to get up to a mountain to watch some daredevils whip around a sharp curve at high speed. Let's go.
Every time they throw an Olympics we all get caught up in the opening ceremony.
Pageantry
Friday night's ceremony had its moments, using an ice surface for ballet motion and depicting the history of the West, although glossing over a few gory details and making the relationship of American Indians and the settlers seem as benign as a square dance.
But that's show biz, and that's what opening ceremonies are.
There were a few lovely snow flurries and the winds that had blown away the inversion revealed that there are indeed real mountains out there.
The Wasatch Valley was glorious, if cold, as everybody in thick parkas tried to cram into the ceremony. Meanwhile, the hills are alive with the sound of hard-rock mogul music.
Get the show on the road.
I'm more interested in whether Michelle Kwan can hit her jumps and win the gold medal or whether somebody else will be playing the role of Tara Lipinski in this performance. I can't wait for Slava Fetisov's Russians to meet Herb Brooks' Americans next Saturday. That is the real stuff.
Every time there is an Olympics, the opening ceremony manufactures a buzz for days ahead of time. The normal trappings of patriotism plus the touching tributes to everybody can get dicey when there are real issues out there in the world -- and when are there not?
This time there was the great flag flap. The world is still going through agony stemming from the attack on the US last September.
Yes, there were some cretins who applauded, but anybody who thinks people in other countries did not bleed for America is missing something.
We all got calls and letters and e-mail messages from all over the world. A friend in Vietnam sent an e-mail message to me, with no trace of irony, that violence is dreadful and that he felt pain for America.
Just by coincidence, there was an American Winter Games coming up five months after the attacks. The horror and the bravery and the hope from Sept. 11 absolutely had to be commemorated here, and they were Friday night.
"Your nation is overcoming a horrific tragedy and we stand by you," said Jacques Rogge, the new president of the International Olympic Committee.
And earlier, eight US athletes had carried the tattered flag from the World Trade Center for the national anthem.
Nevertheless, it's a touchy decision. What happens in 2008 if our Beijing hosts want to display a souvenir from the US spy plane that was downed last year, or some artifact from the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade that was hit by NATO rockets in 1999? I'm just guessing the US might take it personally.
RSS