I watched the Milan-Cortina opening ceremony Friday night with the sound off and a notepad, which is how my old coach Lou DiMaggio said you should watch anything you want to remember honestly. What I wrote down, twice, underlined: they held the Winter Olympics in a soccer stadium. San Siro. The actual cathedral of Italian football, with no ice in it and no snow on it and no real reason for it to be the building where the Winter Games begin, other than the fact that it seats eighty thousand people and looked good from a helicopter.
That is the level of seriousness we are operating at. Nobody in the production meeting raised a hand and said, fellas, this is the wrong sport’s house. They just rolled out a flag the size of a parking lot and told the bobsledders to march.
And march they did, sort of. Team USA came in wearing what the broadcast called “heritage Western outerwear” and what my wife Denise called “Yellowstone cosplay.” Fringe. Wool. A bandana situation. I counted four cowboy hats on a curling team. The curlers, Lou. The curlers are dressed like ranch hands now. I’d like to apologize personally to every American who has ever swept a stone.
But the outfits aren’t what got me. What got me was that I’d say a clean third of our athletes walked into that stadium with a phone held out in front of their face, filming themselves walking, for an audience of people who were already watching them walk on television. I called Ray Kowalczyk during the Slovenia delegation and said, Ray, they’re recording the thing they’re inside of. He said, that’s been the whole century, Duke, where’ve you been.
One luger — and I don’t want to name him, the kid is twenty-two and probably very brave going down a hill on a tea tray — was doing what the kids call “a get-ready-with-me” while marching. Got ready for what. He was already there. He was already in the stadium. The getting was done. There is no further ready to attain. He was applying a chapstick.
The broadcast kept cutting to a sideline reporter — sorry, an “Olympic correspondent” — who was interviewing athletes about their “journey,” which is a word that used to mean a trip and now means anything that happened to you between January and now. One snowboarder said her journey involved “unlearning perfectionism,” which I think means she fell down a lot. I respect the falling. I do not respect the rebrand.
I will give credit where it’s due. The Italians put on a show. There was opera. There was a real live tenor, not a Spotify tenor. There was a moment where they lit something on fire in a way that suggested somebody on the planning committee still believed an opening ceremony is supposed to feel like an event and not like a Super Bowl halftime audition. For about ninety seconds I forgot I was watching the wrong sport’s stadium host the wrong season’s games, and that’s the closest thing to magic the modern Olympics gets to.
Then NBC cut to a commercial for a parlay app that lets you bet on which country’s flag-bearer is taller, and we were back.
Petey Corrigan texted me from his couch around the Norway delegation. Petey was the kind of high school center who’d play a half on a sprained ankle and not tell anybody until Monday. He wrote: “why is the speed skater crying.” I wrote back: “because she’s at the Olympics, Petey, you’re allowed.” He wrote: “no the one in the stands. with the phone.” I had no answer for that one. The whole building was crying into a phone.
The Games start for real tomorrow. People will ski very fast down mountains and slide very fast on ice and a Dutch person will win something we’ve never heard of, and for two weeks I’ll remember why I loved this in the first place. The athletes are still the athletes. The hill is still the hill. Everything around it is the problem, and everything around it always has been; it’s just louder now, and vertical, and sponsored.
Denise is bringing chili over for the downhill tomorrow morning. She says it’s from a podcast. I’m going to eat it anyway.