Secrets of the Olympic Ceremonies. Myles Garcia

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СКАЧАТЬ to the Moscow Organizing Committee, and whatever it had already paid was covered by the solid insurance policy. All in all, NBC lost only about $4.7 million on its first high-stakes flirtation with the Olympic world.

      Flag Flap. The U.S.-led boycott created all sorts of flag protocol problems for these Games: fifteen nations (mostly west European, Australia and Puerto Rico) whose NOCs could not be dissuaded to boycott, participated in those Games under the neutral Olympic flag. Their governments refused to have their national flags officially flown here and the presence of so many white Olympic flags was a source of great embarrassment for the host Soviets.

      (Paradoxically, just twelve years later, when the Soviet empire was dismantled in 1991, the ex-Soviet republics marched in both the Albertville and Barcelona 1992 Opening Ceremonies under the Olympic flag as the Unified Team, although the athletes individually carried little hand-held flags of their respective republics—a direct violation of earlier IOC ceremonial protocol rules.)

      At the Closing, otherwise conventional Olympic protocol procedures were challenged because in what was supposed to have been the Handover segment, neither the flag of the next host country (the U.S.), nor the California flag were raised. Since the U.S. did not recognize those Games, it forbade its flag be flown and its anthem not be played. Instead, just to satisfy some part of Olympic protocol, it was the City of Los Angeles’ flag which was raised to the strains of California, Here I Come (the unofficial, public domain song of the state) at Closing, as the incoming host city.

      Sarajevo 1984. Because the IOC likes to see a certain parallelism in its activities, it then gave the 1984 Winter Games to a slightly more benevolent socialist regime than the Soviets. The 1984 Games were to be played out in the Yugoslavian Muslim enclave of Sarajevo, the city best known as the assassination site of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand--which incident ignited World War One.

      The Sarajevans put on an impressive, coldly efficient opening ceremony. There were magnificent swaths of color in the white snow at Opening. But it was also one of the last few unified, peaceful moments in post-Tito Yugoslavia. Seven years later, in 1991, the break-up of the Yugoslav Republic began, and like the world war (and the Holocaust) which came in the wake of Berlin, Yugoslavia was hurled into a series of civil conflicts and ethnic cleansings. These acts were mostly instigated by the dominant Serbian Republic. Sadly, Sarajevo served as a major killing ground for the prolonged, brutal occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by the Serbs. A lot of the ravaged venues in Sarajevo are nothing but shells of their former glorious days of 1984, a grim reminder of what the Olympics have tried to displace if they could.

      Pyongyang Follies. We now turn to the last holdout of these totalitarian-regime, strictly disciplined, almost mindless performance of massed crowds: the North Korean Mass Games. If anything comes closest to the idea of pure ceremonies for the sake of spectacle–and no sport--it would be the Arirang Games of North Korea. There supposedly is nothing quite like it today. These are annual exercises of massed human displays for spectacle’s sake that precede hardly any sports at all. Oh, there are displays of taekwondo or some sort of martial arts, but whatever little sports there are, are merely a pretext to put on a mass show that only Las Vegas could envy. As many as 80,000 performers–yes, it is in the Guinness Book of World Records, and enough to fill a stadium–are recruited to perform unending formations morphing into other astounding formations. With the national stadium seating 150,000, the ratio of viewer to performer is exactly 2-to-1. Nearly 200 million man-hours are invested in rehearsing the show, starting outdoors in the wintertime--all these just for the glory of the Motherland and the ruling Kim family. And there isn’t even an opening or a closing Ceremony which outsiders normally recognize in the Olympic sense. The Arirang show is communist kitsch in its highest form.

      Because North Korea is still such a closed, xenophobic society, and only a handful of foreign eyes have actually witnessed these unique shows, at very steep ducats, it is rare to get a full accounting of what the shows are really like. There is an excellent 2004 British documentary film called A State of Mind which chronicles the lives of two school girls as they prepare for the Mass Games. Barring availability of that, here is another journalistic account from an October 2005 Los Angeles Times Magazine article:

      “Let the Games Bedazzle,” by Bruce Wallace, L.A. Times staff writer

      The massive floor show blankets the field of Pyongyang's May Day Stadium (capacity 150,000) with columns of dancers and singers, gymnasts and acrobats, soldiers and schoolchildren. It is part of a uniquely North Korean art form known as mass games, and it is seen by the ruling leadership under Kim's son and successor, Kim Jong Il, as an effective way to keep the message of collective struggle—and struggle it is in this hungry police state of 23 million—in the public eye.

      It is also arguably the most ambitious extravaganza ever to flicker across a choreographer's imagination. By comparison, a stadium rock show in the West looks about as sophisticated as a raised Bic lighter. For Arirang, think stadium opera lighted by lasers, with tumbling gymnasts and rivers of performers in colorful costumes, soldiers brandishing bayonets and acrobats dropping from the top of the stadium on bungee cords.

      The finale from the 2005 Arirang show. That whole backdrop is one big stunt card section made up of schoolchildren, mostly ages 10-14.

      Perhaps the most stunning element is the atmospheric backdrop provided by between 15,000 and 20,000 schoolchildren positioned in the seats along one grandstand, facing the audience. They all hold chest-sized booklets of colored cards, which they flip to different pages on cue to create different mosaics. The kids are in effect the light bulbs in a human Jumbotron, and they produce shimmering landscapes of mountains and rivers, raging battlefields, and Korean faces that express emotions from ferocity to joy…Critics say Arirang's wow factor in choreography is achieved on the back of ruthless training--several months of 10-hour-a-day practice drills that turn children as young as 4 or 5 into performing robots.

      “They conduct it every year as a method to reinforce and remind people of the ideology,” says Kwak Tae Jung, a human rights activist based in Seoul who has interviewed 10 North Korean defectors who participated in previous mass games. The defectors describe practicing for hours without food or bathroom breaks. They recall being assigned to classes called “platoons” and say the children of Pyongyang's elite families were exempt from being conscripted into singing and dancing for the regime.

      “People are not paid;” says Kwak, though “once every four or five years, the government would give TV sets or wristwatches as gifts to those who participated. They've been doing it for decades,” he says. “They consider it natural.”

      More same old, same old. At the end of the 2011 Arirang Games, there were rumors that those extravaganzas would finally be retired—but only to be replaced in 2012 by what else? Something even grander, more bombastic and the show to end all communist kitsch shows—a new edition devoted to the beloved Supreme godhead of North Korea, Kim il-Sung. But with the sudden passing of son Kim Jong-Il in December 2011, that might throw the new plans into chaos. However, it seems that the North Koreans, deprived and starved as they were, are really secret grand showmen at heart.

      Busting Certain Olympic Ceremonial Myths

      Certain ceremonial Olympic traditions and fixtures that have appeared sacrosanct through the years are NOT at all such. Various behind-the-scene stories have appeared as of late to place these ‘revered’ Olympic institutions in proper historical context.

      1. The Purloined “Antwerp” Flag. For a regular watcher of Olympic ceremonies, one will be familiar with what is referred to as the “Antwerp” flag–the first flag that supposedly featured the five Olympic rings and which is handed over from the mayor of the finishing host city at Closing to the next city mayor. In 1914, the IOC formally adopted СКАЧАТЬ