I landed in Vancouver during the opening ceremonies of football jersey the Winter Olympics. At the baggage carousel, passengers clustered around a TV to watch K. D. Lang sing “Hallelujah.” You had to wonder, looking at shots of the hockey god Bobby Orr, in a white zoot suit, whether he found this whole exercise in Canadian self-assertion, modest as it might have been by Beijing standards, more painful than any of his ninety-seven knee operations.
It was a dispiriting day, for the hosts. The horrific death of a Georgian luger, on a dangerously fast course on which the Canadians had limited everyone else’s practice, to give themselves an advantage come Gamestime, had, fairly or not, exposed the seamy side of their medal-accumulation ambitions, which they’d been uncommonly open about. The Canadians want so badly for these Olympics to go soccer uniforms off clean, and for their own athletes to clean up, that the show may have been fated to start off with an awful mess. Gottesstrafe, as the Germans say—God’s punishment. Tragedy aside, the torch-lighting snafu and the lousy weather—rain, fog, and unseasonable warmth, which have already postponed Saturday’s showcase event, the men’s downhill ski race, and Sunday’s women’s combined—are examples of the kind of bad luck that befalls overanxious wedding-planners.
As I write (on a BlackBerry…) I am standing at the bottom of the mogul skiing course, up at Cypress Mountain, awaiting the women’s preliminary runs, hoping the fog doesn’t descend from the peaks above to scuttle the race. Rain is falling, and so is night. The mountains are brown, except where the snow has been trucked and flown in. The atmosphere is distinctly unwinterlike, and not very Olympic, perhaps because for the first time in my life I’m not watching the games on TV and so there is none of soccer jerseys the usual theme music to put me in the mood. I suspect, though, that NBC will be framing these early difficulties as a kind of comeuppance. This will drive the Canadians crazy.
没有评论:
发表评论