conflict; but still the communists would not let up. The Asian communists not only succeeded in pushing out the old
Kuomintang rulers of China to the small island of Formosa (now Taiwan) and gaining total control of the mainland, but were actively fomenting another conflict on the Korean peninsula. It was against this redrawn background that spectacular stadium shows of the socialist stripe flourished. They put on shows which someone on a sports forum very aptly and appropriately labeled ‘communist kitsch.’ Today, the mainland Chinese still hold their sports spectacle, the Chinese National Games, on a quadrennial basis.
Fast-forward to 1980. Forty-four years later, the capital city of one of the nations that brought down the Nazis, was itself now decked out in Olympic finery. Although its dance card was half-empty (or half-full, depending on how one looked at the shot of vodka), Moscow was now playing host to the XXIInd Olympiad. The post-war Olympic fathers had given the successor Soviet regime a chance at the Olympic Games. As the largest nation on earth, the Soviets put on a grand, extremely disciplined show. Although those Games were barely seen in the west (or in the U.S., thanks to the Carter administration-led boycott; I had seen an edited version of the opening ceremony at a commercial showing in New York City), the Soviets tried to overcompensate for the absence of its rival sports powers with the most massive Olympic opening ceremony up to that time. As befits a dictatorship, the most obvious quality of the Moscow ceremonies was the joyless discipline of its performers. The young Soviets performed like numb automatons.
The most impressive aspects of the Moscow ceremonies were its stunt card section and the lighting of the cauldron. Some 6,500 Soviet army cadets were pressed into service performing one of the most intricate stunt card shows of all time. The cadets practiced for six months, rehearsing not only some 30-40 unfolding scenes for Opening Ceremony but an equal number for the Closing as well. For the lighting of the cauldron, let’s just say that upper body strength was a premium requirement. A more detailed description of the Moscow 1980 cauldron-lighting awaits in Chapter 7, Lighting the Torch.
Still, the Opening and Closing Ceremonies offered gymnasts galore, folk dancers from every corner of the vast Soviet empire, and still more limber gymnasts than the eye could take in. In a way, the over-the-top, en masse character of today’s Olympic and similar ceremonies can be traced to totalitarian regimes’ shows such as Moscow’s 1980 show.
It is worth noting that the Carter administration’s unpopular boycott machinations might’ve cost NBC, the U.S. network that had won the rights to telecast the Moscow Games, dearly. But in fact, it did not. NBC had made industry headlines when it had bid and won the Moscow rights for $87 million, in the process breaking rival network ABC’s stranglehold over the Games and its cozy relationship with the Olympic poobahs in Lausanne. With its new logo, NBC hoped to launch a blitzkrieg attack in the summer of 1980 to gain supremacy in the ratings war with its Moscow coverage. However, they had also negotiated a very good contract with the IOC and bought an even more far-sighted insurance policy from Lloyd’s for $4.6 million which covered their $87 million investment in the event that the Games were cancelled or the U.S. failed to participate. With the U.S. and its allies bailing out early enough, NBC did not have to fulfill all its advance payments to the Moscow Organizing Committee, and whatever it had already paid was covered by the solid insurance policy. All in all, NBC lost only about $4.7 million on its first high-stakes flirtation with the Olympic world.
Flag Flap. The U.S.-led boycott created all sorts of flag protocol problems for these Games: fifteen nations (mostly west European, Australia and Puerto Rico) whose NOCs could not be dissuaded to boycott, participated in those Games under the neutral Olympic flag. Their governments refused to have their national flags officially flown here and the presence of so many white Olympic flags was a source of great embarrassment for the host Soviets.
(Paradoxically, just twelve years later, when the Soviet empire was dismantled in 1991, the ex-Soviet republics marched in both the Albertville and Barcelona 1992 Opening Ceremonies under the Olympic flag as the Unified Team, although the athletes individually carried little hand-held flags of their respective republics—a direct violation of earlier IOC ceremonial protocol rules.)
At the Closing, otherwise conventional Olympic protocol procedures were challenged because in what was supposed to have been the Handover segment, neither the flag of the next host country (the U.S.), nor the California flag were raised. Since the U.S. did not recognize those Games, it forbade its flag be flown and its anthem not be played. Instead, just to satisfy some part of Olympic protocol, it was the City of Los Angeles’ flag which was raised to the strains of California, Here I Come (the unofficial, public domain song of the state) at Closing, as the incoming host city.
Sarajevo 1984. Because the IOC likes to see a certain parallelism in its activities, it then gave the 1984 Winter Games to a slightly more benevolent socialist regime than the Soviets. The 1984 Games were to be played out in the Yugoslavian Muslim enclave of Sarajevo, the city best known as the assassination site of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand--which incident ignited World War One.
The Sarajevans put on an impressive, coldly efficient opening ceremony. There were magnificent swaths of color in the white snow at Opening. But it was also one of the last few unified, peaceful moments in post-Tito Yugoslavia. Seven years later, in 1991, the break-up of the Yugoslav Republic began, and like the world war (and the Holocaust) which came in the wake of Berlin, Yugoslavia was hurled into a series of civil conflicts and ethnic cleansings. These acts were mostly instigated by the dominant Serbian Republic. Sadly, Sarajevo served as a major killing ground for the prolonged, brutal occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by the Serbs. A lot of the ravaged venues in Sarajevo are nothing but shells of their former glorious days of 1984, a grim reminder of what the Olympics have tried to displace if they could.
Pyongyang Follies. We now turn to the last holdout of these totalitarian-regime, strictly disciplined, almost mindless performance of massed crowds: the North Korean Mass Games. If anything comes closest to the idea of pure ceremonies for the sake of spectacle–and no sport--it would be the Arirang Games of North Korea. There supposedly is nothing quite like it today. These are annual exercises of massed human displays for spectacle’s sake that precede hardly any sports at all. Oh, there are displays of taekwondo or some sort of martial arts, but whatever little sports there are, are merely a pretext to put on a mass show that only Las Vegas could envy. As many as 80,000 performers–yes, it is in the Guinness Book of World Records, and enough to fill a stadium–are recruited to perform unending formations morphing into other astounding formations. With the national stadium seating 150,000, the ratio of viewer to performer is exactly 2-to-1. Nearly 200 million man-hours are invested in rehearsing the show, starting outdoors in the wintertime--all these just for the glory of the Motherland and the ruling Kim family. And there isn’t even an opening or a closing Ceremony which outsiders normally recognize in the Olympic sense. The Arirang show is communist kitsch in its highest form.
Because North Korea is still such a closed, xenophobic society, and only a handful of foreign eyes have actually witnessed these unique shows, at very steep ducats, it is rare to get a full accounting of what the shows are really like. There is an excellent 2004 British documentary film called A State of Mind which chronicles the lives of two school girls as they prepare for the Mass Games. Barring availability of that, here is another journalistic account from an October 2005 Los Angeles Times Magazine article:
“Let the Games Bedazzle,” by Bruce Wallace, L.A. Times staff writer
The massive floor show blankets the field of Pyongyang's May Day Stadium (capacity 150,000) with columns of dancers and singers, gymnasts and acrobats, soldiers and schoolchildren. It is part of a uniquely North Korean art form known as mass games, and it is seen by the ruling leadership under Kim's son and successor, Kim Jong Il, as an effective way to keep the message of collective struggle—and struggle it is in this hungry police state of 23 million—in the public eye.
It is also arguably the most ambitious extravaganza ever to flicker across a choreographer's imagination. By comparison, a stadium rock show in the West looks about as sophisticated as a raised Bic lighter. For Arirang, think stadium opera lighted by lasers, with tumbling gymnasts and rivers of performers in colorful costumes, soldiers brandishing bayonets and acrobats dropping from the top of the stadium on bungee cords.