LADIES FIRST: Kate Middleton (a k a the duchess of Cambridge) greets Michelle Obama yesterday. (AP)
DROPPING BY: A skydiver dresses as Queen Elizabeth II yesterday. (REUTERS)
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LONDON — The ceremony was long, thoroughly British, and there were so many parts that made you feel good about the Olympics, about these quadrennial meetings of nations and athletes. London vowed it would be equal to the task of delivering a memorable Opening Ceremony for the Games of the 30th Olympiad. Mostly, it did.
The laughter and the music, the wonderfully quirky sight of James Bond greeting the queen — and later “jumping” out of a helicopter? The cheers for the athletes, each at the peak of their athletic powers, each taking a victory lap around Olympic Stadium even before any victors are officially declared? That torch — can we agree that’s the coolest torch ever?
Splendid. Wonderful. Beautiful.
That is the magic of the Olympics, always is, the ability to turn the world into a single-stoplight town, the pleasing illusions of permanent friendship as the countries march one after the other in their colorful uniforms and funny hats. It’s like the best mixer you ever attended in school, multiplied by a billion.
Of course, in the middle of all the fun, they managed to throw one stunning, sobering moment that was deplorable in its callousness.
This is the flip side of the Olympics, and it is always loitering, ready to seize back the day. A dirty drug test. An invaded nation competing in a match against its invaders. Empty, naive declarations that politics are banned from the Games when, in fact, they lurk around every corner.
And so it was, moments before the athletes entered the stadium. Two voices — one in French, one in English — asked the crowd — good and worked up now after a long tribute to British musical artists from the Rolling Stones to the Sex Pistols to Frankie Goes to Hollywood — to observe a moment of silence. At that, a visual wall of faces filled the video screens atop Olympic Stadium.
Were they the victims of what Brits somberly refer to as “7/7”, the horrific day in 2005, days after London was awarded these Games, when terrorists visited the city’s transport system? They were not. They were loved ones of audience members who were asked to submit them for the ceremony.
All due respect to the recently deceased but: really? Forty years after 11 Israeli athletes were slaughtered at the Munich Games, with the IOC steadfastly refusing to give an inch and do the decent thing by ordering a moment of commemorative silence, and we get a montage of anonymous cousins and aunts and brothers-in-law?
Really?
The program described it this way: “in a moving moment, those who are absent from us are digitally present.”
That would’ve meant a lot more if the night hadn’t also scrubbed the memory of the Games’ most despicable moment. Nobody was asking for a digital presentation, or a recitation of the names. Just three seconds to recognize and remember. Bad enough for the IOC to fall down; from the awful moment of the murders, that’s what it’s specialized in.
But this? This was gross, and it was pitiless. And it was a shame. Because London truly did reach deep into its soul, and deeper into its history, to give us a show that was equal parts classy and campy, equal parts charming and chatty, and undeniably, irretrievably English, in every wonderful, warped, wondrous sense of the word.
From start to finish, from an overhead flyover to a singalong of “Hey Jude,” it hit every right note, every chord, every emotion. With one exception. Israel’s march was met not with solemn silence but by pulsing Eurodisco. Ah, well. In 2022 there will be a Winter Games somewhere. Maybe they’ll get the 50th right.
For now, for all the glee, we were reminded, again, that the Olympics can make the real world melt away for a few stolen moments at a time every four years, but that in the end, the real world always remains undefeated.