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GELFAND’S WORLD - The Los Angeles 2028 Olympic organizing committee are rumored to have been in a panic after watching the opening ceremony from the Paris Olympics. Looking at the scenic shots of the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and the Arc de Triomphe, they were concerned but still moderately hopeful, but the sight of the athletes traveling on boats along the Seine, with views of Notre Dame cathedral and the Left Bank left them in a near frenzy. "How can we possibly compete with Paris," they asked. Then somebody remembered how Los Angeles engaged in the Millennium New Year celebration (hardly at all) compared to the way Paris was televised around the world, and they were approaching despair. But in the nick of time, someone came up with a way to compete for our upcoming 2028 Olympic Games opening. "Let's do our parade of athletes on the L.A. River," they suggested. You heard it here first.
The LA River
In a city that suddenly (but not unexpectedly) finds itself without extra money to throw at the Olympics, ideas for an internationally competitive kind of opening ceremony have been few and far between. The proposal to put the athletes on gondolas going up to Dodger Stadium didn't in the end have much traction, largely because there is no such thing at the moment. The counterproposal, to use the old Angel's Flight funicular foundered due to similar issues.
Another proposal, to carry the athletes up the northbound 405 at rush hour (to capture the spirit of Los Angeles) was rejected peremptorily.
And finally, one last suggestion that the opening parade consist of the athletes arriving at LAX and using ground transportation was initially received positively, but was found to be impossible to achieve in the mere 36 hours that have been set aside for the celebrations.
It turns out -- once you get past the usual jokes about L.A., that our most essential virtue is our stinginess. We were one of the only places in the world willing to bid on the Olympics to be held anytime during the decade of the 2020s, because there is such a dismal history of cities bankrupting themselves to put on extravagant productions. It's not so much the opening ceremonies as it is the cost of building all those venues for all those different sports. In an era when a new NFL football stadium might run in the billions, 21st century cities looked at the cost of an Olympic stadium -- multiplied by 5 or 10 -- and just said No. Los Angeles looked at its past, where we have hosted the Olympics on a thin budget, and said Maybe.
So we are not going to build another Eiffel Tower, but perhaps we could preserve the Graffiti Towers until 2028. They're not Eiffel, but at least they are towers. And they are now a tourist attraction. We could introduce base jumping as a new Olympic sport and make lemonade out of those lemons.
A few viewers who were totally impressed by the balloon-carried Olympic Flame (how did they do that, anyway?) realized that we could compete with les Parisiennes by using our own La Brea Tar Pits as the next Olympic flame cauldron. It turns out that doing so would violate an obscure rule from the International Olympic Committee, because the expected life of the flame (about 10,000 years) would run over into the following Olympic Games.
And there is one rumor that needs to be laid to rest. In spite of the fact that Los Angeles managed to bring in a retired battleship -- the Iowa -- and features it here in San Pedro, there is absolutely no truth to the story that we are planning to refloat a sunken German battleship and bring it to the Miracle Mile along the same route taken by the Space Shuttle and feature it as a tourist attraction that will be called the La Brea Tirpitz.
Levity aside, there are a few immediate observations on the first weekend of the games.
NBC flogged their upcoming Olympics coverage mercilessly during the U.S. Olympic trials, particularly their over-the-top coverage of the swimming and diving trials. You would have thought that only swimmers who grew up in the Indianapolis suburbs stood any kind of a chance at the games themselves. This first weekend suggests that things are a little different this time, what with swimmers from France and Italy winning gold medals early in the games, Katie Ledecky finishing a fraction of a second out of the gold, and what looks to be an internationally competitive games coming up.
In the world's favorite sport -- what we call soccer and others call football or calcio -- the American men did a little better than expected but aren't really a factor. On the other hand, the American women have been the sport's most successful team, having won 4 Olympic championships and 4 World Cups, but they came into the games in a rebuilding phase, and not expected to do all that well. Perhaps the rebuilding is happening faster than expected, considering the so-far undefeated and untied record including an opening 3-0 win followed by a surprising 4-1 victory over Germany. There is definitely room for improvement (there was one rather spectacular defensive lapse that led to the lone goal scored against them so far) but there is young blood that has figured out how to get the ball into the opposing net. We'll know a little more after the quarter finals.
And then there is rugby, aka rugby football, and in this case officially as Rugby Sevens. It's about the most elemental game, since you score points by running the ball past or over your opponent, and you stop your opponent by knocking him/her to the ground. Yes, that's right, there are mens' and womens' versions of the game, and both are featured in these Olympics. The mens' game has been dominated by traditional Rugby cultures including Fiji, New Zealand, South Africa, and France. The mens' tournament was held over just a few days, with the finals already over. In a dramatic finish, host country France managed to eke out a victory over Fiji.
Meanwhile, the United States has its own womens' team, and it has been surprisingly powerful so far. Our team racked up victories against Japan and Brazil so far, and by wide margins at that. The clue here is that womens' rugby in the United States began developing in the 1970s, at a time when school age soccer was just starting to develop in a big way, and before the dramatic soccer World Cup victories beginning in the 1990s. Womens' rugby has not been the kind of television-level success that womens' soccer has, but it may be that we are competitive on the world level at this time.
Men's basketball began on our television screens with the U.S. facing Serbia. Serbia has one of the NBA's best players. The U.S. team has maybe a dozen. The game was surprising close for a few minutes, and then the NBA all-stars (really) began to do their stuff and it was, for a while, quite the entertaining exhibition. Imagine turning Lebron James and Steph Curry loose against a pretty good college team, and you'll have the idea. These guys aren't supposed to lose, and my guess is that they won't.
As always, women's gymnastics looks to be something worth watching. NBC, in its best Howard Cosell fashion, is concentrating a lot of attention on the morality play that is the Simone Biles story. She had problems (mental or neurological -- it doesn't matter) at the last Olympics and failed to win a neckful of medals. She's back and still one of the world's best, and television therefore has a story to tell. And tell. And tell.
One little irritation to talk about. You know how, when you call a doctor's office to make an appointment, the first thing you hear is, "If this is a medical emergency, hang up and call 911." It's a total waste of time, and it becomes a repetitive waste of time if you go to a doctor more than once in your life. Well, television coverage has its own version of that irritation. Notice those television interviews of the person who just won the gold medal? What do they ask? Is it some pertinent question about competing against a particularly worthy opponent or a point of technique? Not hardly. It seems like every single time, the reporter asks, "How did you feel when you won?"
I'm going to guess that most athletes feel pretty good when they win, just like quiz show participants and lottery ticket buyers and college students competing for grades feel pretty good when they win. It's a dumb question because it's not very interesting and the answers are almost always contrived. But the athlete has been reminded by the coaches and the federation that they represent the country and apple pie and their hometowns, and they have to avoid saying anything scandalous. So they don't.
We have good reason to think about things Olympic right now because we will be hosting the next iteration. Those with responsibility will be thinking about avoiding huge financial losses which have hit other cities. Others will be competing for the right to host some particular sport. And lots of others will be thinking about how to rake off some of that foreign tourist revenue that will magically appear. And we have hardly begun to talk about the World Cup.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
