Secrets of the Olympic Ceremonies. Myles Garcia

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ of finding an American distributor. Faced with fierce protests from many American organizations, in particular the 'Anti-Nazi League,' Riefenstahl did not succeed. The first two screenings in the U.S. were private affairs. The first, in November 1938, was held in Chicago under the auspices of Avery Brundage, then-president of the U.S. Olympic Committee and an ardent Nazi-sympathizer. The second showing took place at the California Club in L.A. with screen Tarzans (and ex-Olympians) Johnny Weissmuller and Glenn Morris in attendance. Morris happened to be Riefenstahl ex-lover. For that screening, Riefenstahl used a copy with almost all the scenes featuring Hitler edited out. Then there was supposedly a public screening in New York in 1940. The U.S. entered the war in December 1941.

      There is one scene in the documentary of a very beautiful woman, in all her naked glory, indulging in some calisthenics. This was supposed to be Riefenstahl herself. Odd that she edited scenes of Hitler for the Los Angeles showing but not this one of herself. In later years, she fudged her age in order to be able to take some scuba diving lessons.

      Because the subject matter and atmosphere was heavily masculine and the documentary was made by a woman, Olympia has sometimes been hailed as one of the ten best films of all time. However, the film doesn’t really hold up well. Riefenstahl’s techniques and camera angles may have been innovative for its time, but with uninspired editing, it looks woefully out-of-date today. With heavy-handed narration, it does not appear too different from most newsreels of its day. Further, compared to later documentaries of postwar Olympics, especially the Bud Greenspan productions which focused on a handful of select stories, Olympia is too comprehensive--encompassing everything, to the point of being tedious and boring.

      Tie a Yella Ribbon ‘round the Old Oak Tree… Aside from the Torch Relay, the award of laurel crowns to athletic winners, one of the other original touches the Nazis added was the awarding of oak tree saplings to the 1936 gold medalists. These came from a giant, mother oak tree in Berlin and the one year-old saplings were given out as symbolic peace-and-goodwill keepsakes. A total of 113 saplings were known to have been awarded. The American team went home with 24 saplings, four of them to Jesse Owens alone.

      The fate of these unique oak tree prizes was researched by Jim Constandt. In tracking down some 97 living 1936 gold medalists around the world, Constandt found that some athletes had either thrown away their plants or just hid them because of their Hitler association. Those that got planted, became sick and/or simply died. The U.S. men’s basketball team drew lots as to who would get its one sapling. It got planted but some seventy years later, no one knew where. Constandt had better luck in finding the Jesse Owens oaks; or the two that survive today. One is at Rhodes High School in Cleveland, Ohio where he trained; the other is at Ohio State University. A third had been planted at his mother’s house also in Cleveland, but that apparently fell victim to a demolition of the house in the 1960s. There was no trace of the fourth Owens oak. Two of the other Berlin oak trees that survive in the U.S. today, are on the USC campus in Los Angeles.

      While the concept of handing out living-green awards is quite politically correct, it would prove impractical today. It would be all but impossible to now bring flora like these home because of stringent agricultural customs laws in most countries, most specifically the U.S. and Australia.

      The outbreak of World War 2, both in Europe and Asia, put a halt to all official Olympic goings-on. However, while the IOC and the Swiss Olympic Committee marked the 50^th anniversary of the IOC’s founding with some small-scale celebrations in Lausanne, Switzerland in June 1944, the spirit of competition carried on during the war years in some of the unlikeliest settings.

      The Lost POW Olympics. Simultaneously in that summer of 1944, two prisoner of war camps in Poland and Germany, the Woldenberg and Gross Born Oflag camps respectively, saw the celebration of mini-Olympics under the direst conditions imaginable. Both were officer camps which mostly housed Polish and other allied military prisoners. At the Woldenberg Oflag II-C POW camp (now Dobiegnieu, Poland), the Nazi captors allowed their prisoners to stage a mini-Olympics. These were called the “International Prisoner-of-War Olympic Games.” The prisoners were allowed to form as national teams and compete in a few sports. Similarly, postage stamps and some coinage were issued with the proper markings; and a makeshift Olympic flag was even used.

      That flag, along with surviving postage stamps, are on view today at the Sports Museum in Warsaw. For some strange reason, perhaps because the Nazis saw their greatest glory in the 1936 Olympic Games of Berlin, they allowed these P.O.W. diversions to take place. Above all, they were a testament of resistance and the Olympic spirit in the face of tyranny and one-time proponent of the Olympic Games.

      Post World War 2. In the aftermath of World War 2, erstwhile allies had broken up into two even more antagonistic camps, seeking total control of the new postwar order. And nowhere was this truer than on the vast Asian mainland. The West (the U.S. really) was weary and weakened by the four-year global conflict; but still the communists would not let up. The Asian communists not only succeeded in pushing out the old

      Kuomintang rulers of China to the small island of Formosa (now Taiwan) and gaining total control of the mainland, but were actively fomenting another conflict on the Korean peninsula. It was against this redrawn background that spectacular stadium shows of the socialist stripe flourished. They put on shows which someone on a sports forum very aptly and appropriately labeled ‘communist kitsch.’ Today, the mainland Chinese still hold their sports spectacle, the Chinese National Games, on a quadrennial basis.

      Fast-forward to 1980. Forty-four years later, the capital city of one of the nations that brought down the Nazis, was itself now decked out in Olympic finery. Although its dance card was half-empty (or half-full, depending on how one looked at the shot of vodka), Moscow was now playing host to the XXIInd Olympiad. The post-war Olympic fathers had given the successor Soviet regime a chance at the Olympic Games. As the largest nation on earth, the Soviets put on a grand, extremely disciplined show. Although those Games were barely seen in the west (or in the U.S., thanks to the Carter administration-led boycott; I had seen an edited version of the opening ceremony at a commercial showing in New York City), the Soviets tried to overcompensate for the absence of its rival sports powers with the most massive Olympic opening ceremony up to that time. As befits a dictatorship, the most obvious quality of the Moscow ceremonies was the joyless discipline of its performers. The young Soviets performed like numb automatons.

      The most impressive aspects of the Moscow ceremonies were its stunt card section and the lighting of the cauldron. Some 6,500 Soviet army cadets were pressed into service performing one of the most intricate stunt card shows of all time. The cadets practiced for six months, rehearsing not only some 30-40 unfolding scenes for Opening Ceremony but an equal number for the Closing as well. For the lighting of the cauldron, let’s just say that upper body strength was a premium requirement. A more detailed description of the Moscow 1980 cauldron-lighting awaits in Chapter 7, Lighting the Torch.

      Still, the Opening and Closing Ceremonies offered gymnasts galore, folk dancers from every corner of the vast Soviet empire, and still more limber gymnasts than the eye could take in. In a way, the over-the-top, en masse character of today’s Olympic and similar ceremonies can be traced to totalitarian regimes’ shows such as Moscow’s 1980 show.

      It is worth noting that the Carter administration’s unpopular boycott machinations might’ve cost NBC, the U.S. network that had won the rights to telecast the Moscow Games, dearly. But in fact, it did not. NBC had made industry headlines when it had bid and won the Moscow rights for $87 million, in the process breaking rival network ABC’s stranglehold over the Games and its cozy relationship with the Olympic poobahs in Lausanne. With its new logo, NBC hoped to launch a blitzkrieg attack in the summer of 1980 to gain supremacy in the ratings war with its Moscow coverage. However, they had also negotiated a very good contract with the IOC and bought an even more far-sighted insurance policy from Lloyd’s for $4.6 million which covered their $87 million investment in the event that the Games were cancelled or the U.S. failed to participate. With the U.S. and its allies bailing out СКАЧАТЬ