The Only Game in Town

by David Remnick

  The obvious precedent for Beijing was the Berlin Olympics, in 1936. Both were showcases for a muscle-flexing nation, although Hitler made an elementary error when he chose not to dress his young National Socialists in lime-green catsuits laced with twinkling fairy lights. By a careful choice of color scheme, China was able to draw the sting from any accusations of militarism, while rarely permitting the result to slide into camp. Whereas the organizers of the Sydney Olympics, in 2000, served up bicycling prawns without a murmur, this was a serious spectacle, and its climax—Li Ning, a former Olympic gymnast and now the owner of a leading sportswear brand, loping through the midnight air, in slow motion, around the inner rim of the stadium—was a pure crystallization of Chinese intent, the entrepreneurial fused with the wondrous. Shares in Li’s company soared like the man himself, and that one night reportedly made his life sweeter by thirty million dollars.

  Like Berlin’s ceremony, Beijing’s was entwined with cinema, and with the great expectations that movies leave in our mind’s eye. The German Games were filmed by Leni Riefenstahl, and shaped into Olympia (1938), just as the Nuremberg rallies were commemorated—and their full meaning revealed—in her 1935 Triumph of the Will. The artistic director of this year’s ceremony was Zhang Yimou, recently the director of Hero and House of Flying Daggers. His films have been dreamily beautiful from the start, and, in a sense, to go from Raise the Red Lantern, in 1991, to raising one vast, glowing, earthlike lantern from the bowels of the National Stadium, with people standing on it at every angle, like the Little Prince, is not so surprising a progression. But there was a time, too, when Zhang made trouble for the Chinese authorities, who banned him from accepting a prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1994, and when his movies stared hard at the problems of individual folk. He has softened since then, becoming a dazzling arranger of hue and motion, and is now the favored son of his homeland, but we no longer watch his work for the depth of the characters, any more than we do Riefenstahl’s. We watch them both and ask ourselves, what kind of society is it that can afford to make patterns out of its people? India is hugely populous, too, but a Delhi opening ceremony would be a more rambunctious affair. Nobody will ever surpass the mathematical majesty of that night in Beijing, and, in retrospect, that may be a good thing.

  It will be scant consolation, however, to Lord Coe. Formerly Sebastian Coe, part of the shining generation of British middle-distance runners in the 1980s, he now heads the team that will bring the Olympics to London in 2012. I tried to pick him out among the VIPs on that first Friday, but without success. He may have been hiding in the men’s room, calling home to order more lightbulbs. You can imagine the rising panic in his voice: “They had two thousand and eight drummers, all lit up. Yes, two thousand and eight. And what have we got so far? Elton John on a trampoline.” I trust that he emerged in time to enjoy the parade of national squads from participating countries, all 204 of them, serenaded by unlikely bands: bagpipes for Monaco, naturally, and a burst of mariachi music for the entrance of the Samoans.

  A new academic discipline suggested itself: acoustipolitics, founded on the statistical correlation between the size of a cheer and the current state of relations between any given nation and its host. Thus, the Chinese roar for Pakistan far outstripped its muted reception of India, echoing a preference that harks back to the Cold War. The American team was greeted with an indecipherable blizzard of white noise. The flag bearer for Guam was lauded wholly, and deservedly, for being enormous; most of the female gymnasts could get a good night’s sleep inside one of his shoes. A storm of applause even met Vladimir Putin as he rose to wave at his compatriots. He wore the polite smile of a man who knew—as the crowd did not yet know—that he had just dispatched his armored divisions to quell a vexatious neighbor. No doubt he was musing upon the wise words of Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general of the United Nations, who had opened the proceedings, in a recorded speech, requesting all nations at war to lay down their arms and thus observe “the Olympic Truce.” At least it was holding on the stadium field, where more than fifteen thousand bodies mixed and shimmered, girdled by an unbreakable ring of young women in short white tennis skirts, whose smiling never ceased. In less than ten hours, tiny Chinese weight lifters would start picking up lumps of metal as heavy as the man from Guam and holding them over their heads. The Games were under way.

  There was much wrangling, ahead of the festivities, over the quality of the air. In all honesty, though, the atmosphere is not that bad: recent analysis uncovered a quantitative ratio of 85 percent nitrogen, 10 percent carbon dioxide, 4 percent oxygen, and 1 percent vichyssoise. On the first day of competition, I watched the cyclists pass through Tiananmen Square, near the start of their road race, and none of them seemed in danger of expiring. Logic suggested that they zip up the east side of the square, since they were heading that way anyhow, but politics demanded that they take the western route, and then hang a right. This allowed them to pass in a pretty blur beneath the portrait of Mao Zedong, who, having overseen the deaths of up to seventy million of his countrymen (and having earned a spot on their banknotes for his pains), was more than happy to survey a handful of fat-free Spaniards in red-and-yellow spandex. I watched the speeding procession in the company of the strapping Goss family, from Amsterdam, all of them rabid fans of volleyball. How did they rate the Dutch chances this year? “We have no volleyball team,” Mr. Goss said, with infinite gloom. The Netherlands hadn’t qualified. The Gosses would have to make do with the beach equivalent, which is to proper volleyball what Elvis’s movies were to Elvis’s music.

  I hope that the Gosses dropped in to the Aquatics Center, the blue quilted cube at the heart of the Olympic Green, to see four of their compatriots win the women’s four-by-one-hundred-meter freestyle relay—their first gold in the event since Berlin, in 1936. Relays, whether in the pool or on the track, are never a disappointment, in part because of the winners’ communal delirium: Replays showed Marleen Veldhuis, who swam a storming final leg for the Netherlands, leaping improbably high from the water to punch the air when the official result flashed up. When Olympic swimming dries up for Veldhuis, as it must, she can always get a job at SeaWorld in Orlando, launching herself out of the deep end to take a herring with her front teeth from a nervous guy on a ladder. But relays compel us, too, because they forge a brief, comic link with our own fumbling experience of competition; one of the final track events at the Olympics is the four by four hundred meters, just as it is in high school meets, and when the American sprinters loused up a baton exchange in the men’s four by one hundred in Athens, four years ago, I was able to murmur, in bitter fellow-feeling, “I did that, too”—not something that most of us can say to a pole-vaulter or a synchronized diver. The same thing happened with artistic gymnastics on the opening weekend, during the team qualifying rounds; as the Americans flipped and twisted on the central floor (whose surprising bounciness is apparent only when viewed from above), there was an empathetic moan to my left. One of the Italian girls, Francesca Benolli, was up on the balance beam, better known as the Official Olympic Human Life Metaphor. She was standing sideways on it, having a wobble. For a few seconds, she was no longer one of the master race from the Olympic Village, spotless in a silver leotard; she was all of us, gloved and scarved, flapping dumbly on our front paths on an icy morning.

  Most people will stay home and watch the events on TV, having no other option, but be warned: What NBC chooses to broadcast is not the Olympic Games. They offer selected clips of selected American athletes, largely in major sports, sometimes hours after the event, whereas, if the bruised Olympic ideal still means anything, it means loosing yourself, for a couple of weeks, from the bonds of your immediate loyalties and tastes. It means watching live sports you didn’t know you were interested in, played by countries you’ve never been to, at three o’clock in the morning—not just watching them, either, but getting into them, deluding yourself that you grasp the rules, offering the fruits of your instant expertise to anyon
e who will listen (“I think you’ll find the second waza-ari counts as ippon”), and, most bewildering of all, losing your heart. If I didn’t follow the horrors in Munich, in 1972, it wasn’t just because I was too young to understand but because I was occupied with worshipping Lasse Virén, the bearded Finnish policeman who won both the five thousand and the ten thousand meters on the track.

  The habit has never left me. To witness four or five events, from ringside, should be sufficient for any sports freak, but, slumping back into my room after midnight, steaming from a walk through hot polluted rain, my soul aquiver with Korean archers and other triumphant minorities, I still found the will to switch on CCTV, the main state-run Chinese channel, and catch the bronze-medal fight in men’s lightweight judo. It was a playoff, or heave-off, between Rasul Boqiev, of Tajikistan, and Dirk van Tichelt, of Belgium, and there was no doubt who would score ippon and thereby gain the prize. The Belgian seemed out of gas before he began, pink-browed and gulping for breath, unlike the sterling Boqiev, who looked as if he should be on horseback, surveying the steppe with a falcon on his wrist. At the instant of victory, he raised both hands wide in gratitude to his god, his thumbs strapped and—as is compulsory for judokas, according to The Complete Book of the Olympics, by David Wallechinsky—his fingernails trimmed.

  The newest edition of Wallechinsky’s masterpiece, which he compiled with his nephew Jaime Loucky, may be the most entertaining book ever written. Where else can you read of Martinho de Araujo, the tragic weight lifter from East Timor, who, only eight years ago, having lost his training equipment in the war of independence, “was forced to create a makeshift bar by sticking a pole in buckets of wet cement”? As for Eva Klobukowska, the Polish sprinter who won two medals at Tokyo, in 1964, and became the first athlete to fail a sex test, I wouldn’t have believed it were it not for the photograph supplied by Wallechinsky, which confirms that the lady in question resembled Harry Dean Stanton after an evening of rye and Lucky Strikes. Meanwhile, the ever-bristling issue of drugs is put into vivid perspective by Chris Finnegan, the Cassius Clay of Old England. In 1968, he won the middleweight title, fair and square, but failed miserably when it came to the provision of a urine sample. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t; he just couldn’t. “Now, if there’s one thing I’ve never been able to do, it’s have a piss while someone’s watching me,” the eloquent bricklayer explained. “I can never stand at those long urinals you get in gents’ bogs, with all the other blokes having a quick squint.” Oh, for a new Finnegan, forty years on. It isn’t the doping officials I would worry for; it’s the Chinese interpreters.

  Wallechinsky’s guide was with me as I arrived for the water polo. Thanks to him, I was primed to note the fine distinctions between the three kinds of foul that can be committed in the course of a game; after a minute, I laid the book aside, having realized that all three were being committed all the time by everybody. The rules and infringements of this ancient sport are of a solemn complexity, but all are founded on the fundamental desire of one person to treat another as a tea bag. You find your opposite number, grab him (or her), and dunk, regardless of whether the ball is anywhere in the vicinity; neck holding is especially popular, involving, as it does, much frantic splashing on the part of the drowner, and the whole exercise looks weirdly like a lifesaving class, except that the motive is reversed. The sport rode a big wave in 1924, when the American Olympic team in Paris included Johnny Weissmuller—presumably without his chimp, although with water polo it could be hard to tell.

  I got to watch America versus China, an appetizer for the basketball encounter later in the day. (America won both.) The water polo took place at the Yingdong Natatorium, which cries out to be modified, once the Games are over, into a global forum for nonsense verse. How can you not love a sport in which, as a hooter signals the start of the game, the public-address system plays the theme from Jaws, and the two central attackers sprint-crawl for the ball, which bobs gently in the center of the pool? The halftime entertainment was a moist echo of the opening ceremony: ten young Chinese women in wipe-clean dresses with transparent hems, whacking cylindrical drums filled with running water. It was chaos, in perfect harmony. Four older women had to bustle on afterward with buckets and mops to sponge up the mess. China, in its restless drive for invention, was busy creating needs, like drum-water clearance, that had never existed before, in the confidence that it would always have enough people to meet them. Lord knows what the later stages of the Games will bring, but rest assured: if there are flaming violinists, there will be dedicated musical firefighters standing by with a hose.

  Are the Chinese right, however, to douse each conflagration? Olympic history is a merry mixture of sportsmanship and fracas, and the prevailing wish, among aficionados in Beijing, is that the remaining days should pass off peacefully, but not so peacefully that only the boxers get to throw a punch. Croatia and Serbia made a promising start at the Yingdong, with misconduct so unrelenting that three players and a coach were thrown out of the game—shades of Melbourne, in 1956, when the Hungarians, enraged by the Soviet invasion of their country, used water polo as the weapon it was always meant to be. “There was blood in the pool,” Donald Hook, an Australian who was there, told me. On August 12, I traveled in similar high hopes to the China Agriculture University Gymnasium, a pleasant spot, where the plan was that Lasha Gogitadze, of Georgia, should bump up against the Russian Nazyr Mankiev in Greco-Roman wrestling, thus prolonging, and perhaps inflaming, a situation that everyone else on the planet was trying to subdue. If all went well, they could aim to smash the record set in 1912, by Russia’s Martin Klein and Finland’s Alfred Asikainen, whose countries weren’t at war but who nonetheless grappled manfully with each other for eleven hours. Regrettably, Gogitadze and Mankiev never came to blows, although I did see Roman Amoyan, a cuboid Armenian who had just won a bronze medal bout, bellow his delight toward an Azerbaijani section of the crowd. That takes nerve.

  And thus the attempt to keep politics out of sport, which is as futile as trying to keep the sweat out of sex, began to falter once more. Tempers began to splinter. On the evening of August 11, a cream-colored armored car appeared outside the Main Press Center, half a mile from the National Stadium. In a far from plausible piece of window dressing, it was encircled by a red rope, like Angelina Jolie at a première, and its gun was sheathed in green wrapping. Was that a threat or a subtle joke, on the part of the Chinese military, about the muzzling of a free press? In the same way that President Bush was flummoxed by the buttocks of Misty May-Treanor, as proffered to him during a beach volleyball match, so none of us knew how to treat the armored car. Should we slap it or tap it? In the event, we gave it a quick squint, as Chris Finnegan would say, and walked on by.

  2008

  RACE TRACK

  BILL BARICH

  I am not by nature a compulsive gambler, so it came as a surprise to me when I started playing the horses compulsively. This happened some years ago, during a bleak midwinter season I spent on Long Island. I was visiting my mother, who had cancer. She was a good patient, easy to be around, but the progress of her disease was mean and slow and often difficult to witness. Whenever it overwhelmed me, I left the house and took a walk through the old neighborhood. One afternoon, I passed something I’d never seen before, an Off-Track Betting parlor, and stopped in and made a blind two-dollar bet on a horse named Quiet Little Table, who was running at Aqueduct, and then went home and listened to a broadcast of the race on the radio. Quiet Little Table dropped from contention in the stretch, but the race was still electric, and made my heart pound and my body feel light and untroubled. Even my mother, who had always cautioned her children against gambling, seemed excited; I thought some adrenaline might have seeped into her system and briefly relieved her pain.

  The next thing I knew, I was driving to the newsstand every morning to buy a Daily Racing Form from a sleepy-eyed Romeo who peppered his otherwise salacious conversation with hot tips. The Form is an indispensable publication
that gives a compact symbolic history of the horses entered in the day’s races at major tracks nearby. Beginners usually find it unwieldy, since it offers more information than anybody could possibly absorb, including a horse’s age, sex, color, parentage, birthplace, breeder, owner, trainer, racing record over the past two years, and amount of money won, but most serious gamblers won’t make a wager without first studying its contents. At home, I spread the Form on the kitchen table and began the perilous exercise known as handicapping, which involves weighing the merits and defects of all the entrants in a given race over and over until the apparent winner emerges. The most telling facts were to be found in the past-performance records. These blocks of statistics, one per horse, showed in copious detail just how well that horse had done in its most recent outings: the fractional times for each of its races; the running line, or exactly where it had been positioned during five different phases—first call, second call, third call, stretch call, and finish—of each race; the caliber of competition it had been facing; its relative speed and preferred distance; and several other factors essential to the handicapping process. I had studied the Form before, but never with such intensity; now I bent to the pages like an adept parsing mystical texts. Sometimes they were runic, impossible to decipher, but at other times winners stepped readily forward to speak their names.