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So the Olympic Games are finally over. Paris 2024 has provided us with more than 2 weeks' of excitement as well as a fair share of controversy. I think the overwhelming sense from many people is that Paris put on a really good show, and the athletes were genuinely excited about being in Paris and competing at many of the venues with iconic backdrops.
This time around the TV rights in Hong Kong were bought by the government, who granted the four broadcasters rights to show whatever they wanted. So we had, at times, up to 7 different channels with live coverage of the games. However, the channels prioritized events where Hong Kong or Chinese athletes were participating, and since each broadcaster wanted to attract viewers, there were many instances where I would see 4 different channels - one from each broadcaster - showing the exact same event. Yes, there were times when I could only watch two different events out of 6 channels broadcasting the games.
Nevertheless, I got to see plenty of action in beautiful Paris. Shots of fencing competition in Grand Palais, where Hong Kong's Vivian Kong Man Wai (江旻憓) took the gold in the Women's Individual Épée under that gorgeous glass ceiling on the first day of competition after the Opening Ceremony. Triathlon athletes bicycling and running, as marathoners did, on Pont Alexandre III and past the Tour Eiffel, and shots of them on Champs-Élysées with the Arc de Triomphe in the distance. Skateboarders jumping over obstacles with the Obelisk of Luxor as the backdrop. All memories I will cherish.
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It's that time again. The Olympics are back, and ever since the closing ceremony almost 3 years ago, I have had high expectations for the show that the French would put on for the world. In fact, the short clips from Paris 2024 that aired during the Closing Ceremony of Tokyo 2020 was the best part of that show.
I went to bed after dinner tonight, and got up a few minutes before the 1:30 a.m. start time of the Opening Ceremony of Paris 2024 to watch it live. This time around the Hong Kong Government had purchased the broadcasting rights for the Games, and we are able to watch events via the city's four free-to-air broadcasters.
The show started with a humorous clip of Jamel Debbouze carrying the Olympic flame into an empty Stade de France with no one in sight... except for Zizou tapping him on the shoulder and offering to take the flame from him. After Zizou buys a ticket to hop on a Paris Metro train but gets stuck, he passes the flame to three kids who run through the underground tunnels, catacombs, and gets invited to hop into a rowboat on a canal - probably Canal Saint-Martin - by a figure in period costume. This was the first appearance of the Mysterious/Masked Torchbearer - and we would see them run through famous sights in Paris as well as on Parisian rooftops à la Arsène Lupin - one of four inspirations for this character along with Belphégor, Fantômas, Ezio Auditore da Firenze, the Phantom of the Opera, and the Man in the Iron Mask - hence the fencing mask obscuring the identity.
From early on, it's clear that the show would have both light-hearted as well as dark, brooding elements. It would also be obvious that with the national motto of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité included as chapters along with Sororité, this would be the "DEI Olympics"... at least when it came to the Opening Ceremony.
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The Tokyo 20202021 Olympic Games was always gonna be different. Having been delayed from 2020 due to the global pandemic, it was finally held over the last 2 weeks in spite of the pandemic still being in place. In fact, many countries around the world - Japan included - were experiencing a resurgence of Covid-19 cases at the moment. Yet both Japan and the International Olympic Committee have invested way too much to call this thing off, and I think many of the athletes would probably not want to wait any longer. So we had the opening ceremonies on July 23rd, and I dutifully made sure I got home on time for the broadcast.
Based on the portion that Tokyo showcased at the end of the Rio 2016 closing ceremonies, I had very high hopes for the Tokyo show. That segment showed a lot of energy, creativity, and infused elements of popular Japanese culture known the world over - including popular anime characters. After all, who could forget former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo (安倍晋三) dressed up as Super Mario?
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I bid farewell to the Mandarin Oriental Geneva bright and early, and headed to the Gare de Genève Cornavin for my morning train out of town. I'm meeting Mr. and Mrs. B, who are taking me sightseeing today. This is my third time in Geneva, and honestly I didn't get to see much of the area around Lake Geneva on my previous trips. My friends very kindly picked me up from the train station near their home, and we drove to the vineyard terraces of Lavaux - which have been classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
It was, unfortunately, drizzling and gray. Not really possible to take pretty pictures of the lake today. Oh well...
Our first stop was Lavaux Vinorama - a tasting room where one can sample wines from many different small producers. To be honest, I haven't had much experience with Swiss wines, not to mention good Swiss wines... but I was willing to keep an open mind and try. We ordered a few glasses and shared them, taking a few sips of each. The tasting notes are here.
Lunch was at Là-Haut, a restaurant in Chardonne with views of the lake. Mr. and Mrs. B had been here when it was under the former chef, and they were curious how the style would have changed under new chef Mathieu Bruno.
Our meal stated with a few mises en bouche:
This was cucumber, verbena, and lemon. After a nice and refreshing hit, turned somewhat bitter in the middle.
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Another four years have gone by, and this year we had the Olympics held in Rio de Janeiro. I've long been a seller of the Rio Games, and didn't think they could actually manage to pull it off. They did. So kudos to the Brazilians for getting their act together (mostly). They overcame plenty of obstacles, not the least of which was fear of the Zika virus.
As usual, I made an effort to watch the Opening Ceremony, which meant dragging my ass out of bed before 7 a.m. on a Saturday. But it's usually worth it, and I gotta say that I really enjoyed it this time.
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So it's been four years since the Beijing Olympics, and we've had another edition of the opening ceremonies. I actually got up to watch the show in its entirety, after watching the ceremonies for the first time four years ago. I did have a few words to say about some of the elements of that show, which I hoped would not be repeated four years later by the Brits.
Let's face it, Beijing pulled out all the stops four years ago, and it's gonna be tough to top that show. However, I don't think that was the aim of director Danny Boyle, and the results were pretty evident. I thought it was interesting that we were taken through the different stages of how the British isles were transformed from a rural, agrarian society through the industrial movement, then onto modern day.
I can see why some of the world's audience may not "get" parts of the show. I didn't quite get the segment about NHS and GOSH, but I guess that was a lead-in to the segment on children's literature. There was a lot of rock 'n' roll and pop music throughout - especially during the jukebox segment - which was no doubt easier for people like myself to enjoy.
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We are now more than halfway through the Beijing Olympics, and news about the Opening Ceremony continue to trickle in. All of this confirmed my belief that things in China haven't really progressed/evolved all that much after all...
I must admit I was pretty awe-struck by the artistic show for the first hour, under the direction of famed director Zhang Yimou (張藝謀). Zhang is one of my favorite directors, although his more recent works have demonstrated a clear shift away from his early style. He has been accused of focusing less on the story and concentrating only on the aesthetic aspects, but this is fine by me as I love the cinematography and some of the special FX of his recent works. The visual element is very important to me.
Well, the show was pretty. The giant scroll/screen was really something. And the sight of dancers gracefully "painting" on the scroll with "ink" really impressed me. Showcasing the four great inventions of the Chinese civilization was also a good way to allow the world to see the contribution made by the Chinese people.
But...somewhere along the line things went a little wrong.
At the very beginning, when the TV was showing the footage of the 29 giant "footsteps" traveling across Beijing, I noticed something strange. The images I saw looked like CGI and didn't look like any live footage I had ever seen. The lighting was all wrong and it looks like it was processed. When the live broadcast cut to the view from inside the Bird's Nest, the contrast was all the more evident.
Of course, we now know that the first part of the footage was "faked" - it wasn't live at all! It was indeed computer enhanced.
After this was uncovered, the organizers defended their actions by stating that due to the unpredictable weather and the difficulty of positioning helicopters to shoot live footage, they decided to come up with the best solution so that the image people saw would be "perfect." Hmmm...
Then, in the middle of the ceremony, we saw a group of children present the Chinese national flag, dressed in the native costumes of 56 ethnic groups found within China. As the procession went on, we also saw a pretty little girl in a red dress singing a song in a beautiful voice. As the camera focused on the little girl, I couldn't help but notice that she was offbeat...her lips didn't quite match the words I was hearing. As I was already intoxicated by this point (see The best suckling pig ever), I didn't give it another thought.
By now this segment has caused two separate "sensations": none of the children came from ethnic minorities - they were all Han Chinese - even though the program introduced them as minorities. And the little girl in the red dress was lip-synching to a recording made by the real singer, who was deemed to be not up to the visual standards of the officials. In other words, she just wasn't pretty enough for TV.
The organizers, of course, again have their justifications. It's quite normal for people of one ethnicity to dress up in the costumes of another, they say, especially in a performance. That may be true, but then perhaps the program shouldn't state that they are minority children. That's a blatantly false statement.
As for the little girl, well...the Chinese officials wanted the whole world to see a pretty face, while at the same time hear the perfect voice. So by doing what they did, they were able to deliver the best of both worlds.
Unfortunately, the rest of the world didn't buy this argument, and neither do I. William Pesek called it "China's Milli Vanilli moment" in his Bloomberg column, making reference to the disgraced pop duo who lost their Grammy Award after it was discovered that they lip synched everything.
This particular action by the Chinese officials have now further tainted the Opening Ceremonies, turning it into a big joke.
When audiences pay good money to go to a live concert, they want the real thing. If they find out that the artist on stage was lip syching, you can bet that they would be extremely upset and even demand their money back. Why would the live audience inside th Bird's Nest that night - and audiences around the world who paid via the TV broadcast rights - feel any different? And can you imagine people's reaction (not to mention the artist's own feelings) if the organizer told Sarah Brightman that they preferred a prettier singer, so can she please just sing in the background while someone else stood on top of the globe and lip-synched to "You and Me"?
Oh, and it was also revealed that Beijing didn't want TV cameras and audiences to see empty seats at some of the less popular events, so they got "volunteers" to fill up those empty seats so that the world can see how popular the Beijing Olympics is.
All this points to one message - that China is all about what's superficial, that presenting the best image possible is all that matters to the powers that be. This, coincidentally, fits in quite well with what we have seen from Zhang Yimou in the last few years - and is exactly what he is being critized for.
I have heard people complain about the "racist" West nitpicking the little flaws of the Opening Ceremony, a statement echoed by Wang Wei, the Executive Vice President and Secretary General of the Beijing Olympics Organizing Committee. Mr. Wang called the accusing press "meticulous" - the exact quote in Chinese is "我認為你太吹毛求疵了". I completely, respectfully disagree.
The whole world knows that the Olympics has always been regarded by the Chinese central government as its "coming out party." A chance to show the world the might of the Chinese people, and all the things that China can achieve. The fact that China threw an estimated USD 44 billion into staging the Olympics and building new hardware is a testament to how important this is to them. The whole world is watching, and China cannot afford to let the world see any flaws in the big show.
But when you make such a big deal about something in public, you can't really complain about people putting everything under a microscope, because you invited the whole world to come and see it for themselves!
And the name of the game continues to be hardware, which really is what China has had to show for over the last 10 years. We know China now has lots of dough, and is certainly not short of people or labor. So just throw resources at something and build some impressive hardware to show people how great you are. Forget the software - it doesn't matter and you can't see it on TV anyway. Forget reality and what's underneath - coz all we need is the best image and face. We have the Bird's Nest, we have the Water Cube. We have a new airport terminal. What else do you want?! We just want the big picture, and sweep everything else under the carpet and forget about it.
With this mentality, it's no wonder that the Olympics turned out the way it did.
Oh by the way, reports have surfaced recently that two of the Chinese girls on the women's gymnastics team are underage. This is of course denied by the officials, but honestly, when I saw them on TV I cannot image that they have reached puberty...
