Secrets of the Olympic Ceremonies. Myles Garcia

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СКАЧАТЬ Up against the other foreign finalists, the cities wage a global campaign--bringing their show-and-tell acts to various international gatherings and sports events, chasing IOC members around the world to secure votes, and waging an international PR campaign.

      At an IOC meeting seven years before the actual Games, the Olympic “family” comes together for their grand pow-wow (called a Session) and selects the next homecoming queen. At the time of writing, the IOC had just selected the city of PyeongChang South Korea as the host of the XXIIIrd Winter Games of 2018 over Munich, Germany and Annecy, France.

      In the previous race for Summer 2016, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro began their immediate quest in earnest around 2002-03. Madrid made the short list for the 2012 race; Rio did not. The two came back and represented their respective continents for 2016 (probably the only selection contest in Olympic history wherein all the finalists were from different continents; representing Asia was Tokyo; and Chicago for North America.) However, Tokyo’s Olympic dream went farther back to 1935 when it was named the original host for the 1940 Games; but those plans were aborted by World War II. In 1964, Tokyo finally got its turn to host.

      Chicago, on the other hand, might have seemed like the new kid on the block for the class of 2016--but in reality, the Windy City was seeking to reclaim a century-old lost dream. Remember, it was Olympics founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s original choice for the 1904 Games until it was taken away by St. Louis instead. One hundred years later, Chicago pursued the dream again. So chasing an Olympic hosting dream can actually last more than a century.

      What It Costs to Win a Modern Olympic Games

      Like anything connected with the Olympics, bidding to win the designation alone is a multimillion dollar venture. Some costs* (est.) of bidding for recent Olympic Games:

      •Los Angeles’ three successive bids (1976, 1980 and 1984) – $300,000

      •Atlanta 1996 – $7.8 million

      •2012: London ($48 million); Madrid and Moscow (about $30 mil each); Paris ($40 mil); New York ($32 mil-- $10.1 mil from Mayor Bloomberg’s and his deputy, David Doctorow’s ($5 mil) own pockets)

      •2014: PyeongChang ($21 mil); Salzburg ($8.5 mil); Sochi (est. $90-95 million)

      •San Francisco just before it dropped out of the 2016 domestic race - $535,000

      •2016: Chicago ($76 million); Madrid ($51 mil); Rio de Janeiro ($48 mil); Tokyo ($150 mil (!)

      •2018: Annecy ($26 million); Munich ($42.5 mil); PyeongChang ($31.5 mil)

      •For 2020, Tokyo announced they would spend the leftover $75 million from the 2016 run; Madrid dropped its bid budget to (est.) $33 million. Rome and Durban, South Africa, once considered the frontunners, dropped out altogether when the overall economic picture demanded it.

      *The above are outright figures which do not include donated goods and services from city departments and countless man-hours extracted from volunteers and interns. In addition, hard-core supporters pay their own way to go to the selection city (e.g., 180 Atlantans flew to Tokyo in 1990; 300 Chicagoans chartered a jet to Copenhagen 2009; over 100 Munich supporters flew to Durban for the 2018 vote) as “unofficial” cheering sections of the various delegations. Their out-of-pocket costs are usually not counted in a bid’s generic costs but can certainly add up. The Chicago 2016 junket was priced at $3,500 per person--so with 300 people, the whole cost of the expedition came to over $1,050,000.

      As this edition was going to press, the IOC had finally taken notice of the prohibitively costly manner of bidding. For starters, it imposed severe restrictions on the 2020 candidate cities on promoting their bids in London 2012 and similar events. Now if it would only allow the delegates to actually visit the candidate cities again, perhaps some sanity could be restored to the process.

      What are Ceremonies?

      Ceremonies are rituals. Since the dawn of man, our species has used rituals to mark an event in life–a passage, a celebration. From the gathering of primitive man around a fire to celebrate a hunt, to a rain dance of tribes, to a baptism or a simple wedding in some remote village, to a centennial or a statue, or the victory in some conflict or struggle, humans have chosen to mark milestones in their life with some sort of ritual.

      The Ancient Games. Since the original Olympic Games of Antiquity were celebrated as a religious festival with the athletic competition as a sideshow, it is difficult to determine what constituted pomp for pageantry’s sake and what was religious ritual. But it is known that there was some sort of torch/cauldron-burning and that the athletic victors were awarded at least with crowns of wild olive leaves.

      The Modern Games. In 1894, a French nobleman, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, revived the idea of the Olympic Games. In the 1880s, de Coubertin was dismayed at the state of sport and French public education. In Great Britain, the United States and Germany, France’s greatest rival at the time, he saw that sport was intertwined with education and the results on their youth. He didn’t see that in the upcoming French generation. Thus, de Coubertin seized upon the idea of reviving the ancient Olympic Games in an industrialized world. At a convocation he organized at the Sorbonne University in 1894, with delegates from nine nations in attendance, de Coubertin put forth the idea of a revived Olympic Games with such conviction that the delegates unanimously agreed and even did him one better.

      Coubertin originally hoped to have the renewal of the Olympic Games coincide with the Paris International Exposition of 1900 and the start of the twentieth century. But the enthusiasm of the delegates for his idea could not be contained; they outvoted him to hold the revived Games in 1896 in Athens, Greece rather than wait for Paris 1900. Thus was born the Olympic Games of the Modern Era.

      For the modern Olympics, the IOC Charter has, of late (the Charter terminology gets revised every few years) hinted that Organizing Committees are “… encouraged to highlight some aspect of their national culture in the Artistic portions of the Opening Ceremony…”

      Each Olympic Games literally closes its books when it presents a final report to the IOC months after the closing ceremony. Those final reports are multi-volume books called The Official Report of the __th Games of (City here…) and contain a detailed summary of all the salient points of the organization of those Games. Following is an excerpt from the Official Report of Munich 1972 describing what an Olympic Opening should be (parenthethicals are author’s views):

      “First of all the Organizing Committee (OC) applied itself to the Opening Ceremony: The ceremony served as an introduction to the Games. Its staging influenced the total style of the following Olympic days.

      (Section) 5.4.1 The Conception of the Opening Ceremony Guidelines. The ceremonial of the opening celebration is regulated in great detail by the IOC Statutes. There was little leeway left to the organizers of the Olympic Games for original ideas and initiative. Nevertheless, the OC tried to embody the guidelines of the Munich games in the traditional ceremonial. The opening ceremony was to appear neither religious, military, nationalistic, nor overly pompous. (Ha!) Instead it was intended to be spontaneous and light and to establish rapport between the performers in the arena and the audience on the tiers. Means to this end were:

      -strong visual effects, carefully tested for their effectiveness.

      -symbolic actions, their meaning easily recognized.

      -commonly appreciated and suitable music.

      The IOC had to approve all changes in the ceremonial. However, the OC did not want to submit details bit by bit, but rather presented a completely thought out and СКАЧАТЬ