Jay Leno left the Tonight Show earlier this week. Could've been yesterday but I have been inundated with reports about Sochi 2014 - most of them concerning a little thing called the Winter Olympic Games. Already, the biggest opponents have attempted to hijack a plane in order to put some heat on the organizers... the odds of some kind of crazy shit happening in the open (let alone the stories we won't hear till March or later) are high enough to keep everyone placing money on the most outrageous tragedies, disruptions, and events. The Vancouver 2010 luge death might end up looking like a mild sprain, when all is said and done in Sochi.
An entire unit of the Russian Army is patrolling the Georgia/Russia border, and the stuff those guys are getting up to is no doubt quite interesting and compelling, but their opponents have sworn to engage in the sort of chaos-terrorism that military action has not yet been able to completely prevent. I am not reporting this to be gleeful or glib, but dozens of years of military retribution have only managed to stoke the flames of resentment. Even the Cossacks have been called in. While the hijacker/bomb-threat guy is getting beaten up by security personnel and interrogated to within an inch of his life, and incarcerated in a post-gulag gulag, the games must go on. Bookies are refusing to take bets on terrorist activity, citing a worldwide surveillance apparatus and generally bad odds of anything major going wrong (the latter excuse seems questionable to me).
Surely they will, but there is more trouble than just the threat of violence and bomb blasts. There is also bad press, blistering social media output, and international confrontation. A major ideological schism has haunted the Sochi Olympics since last year, and that is the spectre of Russian homophobia, which is not quite so much a regional thing in Sochi. For a while, in late 2013, it seemed as if a few countries might boycott the games, but abandoning the athletes on human rights principles was ultimately considered unthinkable. I am not an expert and I have not been following the issue closely, but I don't think a single country ended up boycotting the games for the beaten and dead gays of Russia.
Even so, some countries have declined to send their Primest Leaders to visit the games. President Obama of the United States will not attend, nor will Prime Minister Harper of Canada, among others. This is sort of a black eye for Vladimir Putin and Russia, a classic Western political snub, based on various events within and without the country. Media reporting is highly all about the west-east dynamics of the game, gleefully pointing out unfinished and subpar venues and housing projects. It is all vaguely reminiscent of Cold War antagonism, as absent leaders poke a figurative finger into Russia's figurative eye about much publicized human rights issues. Perhaps they don't care about their athletes, or their own domestic human rights issues (not that human rights issues are only an issue in Russia, or not an issue in Western countries).
A true boycott may have been the only way to protest the treatment of gays, bisexuals, and trans Russians by their countrymen, but it was abandoned in the face of OLYMPIAD PRIDE, a billion-dollar game in which athleticism is eclipsed by organizational glory and the thrill of winning more medals than other countries. A boycott would've been heavy-handed in any case. The big three Winter Olympic teams (by pure numbers) are: the United States, which is dedicated to always providing a strong showing; Russia, which seeks hometown glory and has to compete directly with the United States; Canada, which needs the winter Olympics to compensate for the Summer Olympics.
Canada will likely trounce everyone in curling and put in strong showings in all other events, though competition has been heating up as other countries put together potent curling teams. I think it will be a strong showing for Canada, as their medal-grabbing program at their own home games in Vancouver managed to be quite effective, and Prime Minister Harper has personally requested 110% of each athlete, though he admits the fatuousness of that percentage. He is reported to have delivered a passionate and highly factual speech to the men's hockey team before they flew to Sochi, and is certainly (or almost certainly) personally invested in their victory.
But let's not forget the highly specialized and elite teams and individuals representing Norway, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, The Netherlands, Sweden (favored to take men's hockey by storm)... the list goes on and I declined to read it, or any other press releases, because I'm a shit blogger and my hunch is the Big Stories concerning these games will be 1) Security, 2) Political Shenanigans, 3) the most meme-worthy moments of the games (and there are bound to be a few good ones). I don't think that's right, but it's how the media will represent it, echoing the sometimes atavistic and frustrating views of the Western public about Russia, which in my opinion deserves its Olympics, whatever its other problems. I'll bet it all ends up being at least as good as the Vancouver, BC games of 2010, without any major tragedy or outbreak of chaos, but constant social media scrutiny and overblown media responses may cause a different perception among the public and potentially even the athletes. Wildly interesting stories may emerge in March and beyond, which may confirm or deny things we can only speculate about at this point.
And that's just Day One. The 2014 Winter Olympics have just started, prompting one attempted hijacking within 24 hours and promising much more drama on the security front. This leaves many asking themselves if the games will not be overshadowed by security and political confrontation, not to mention the many humorous stories of athletes and journalists finding stray dogs in the Olympic village, and trading light bulbs and WiFi access for toilet paper. The opening ceremonies nimbly danced around the issue of Soviet Russia but managed to reference some of my favorite writers and one of my top 20 composers, but I didn't catch most of it because I was sleeping, and had to read various reports and youtube clips to get any idea of it.
3 days of pondering whether to blog this article later:
So, yeah. Jay Leno is done, and he cried a bit (to me, it was all just Larry Sanders Show), and he misses an opportunity to make the same joke about Sochi that everyone else is making, every night until the Olympics are over. Will Jimmy Fallon be able to take over without alienating the viewers who don't like change? We will see. I might not notice until it's too late, and Leno is brought back again. I think 22 years is deserving of some respect, even if Leno was never my favorite late-night host. Neither was Letterman.
But the Olympics, hell... truly the 'big story' of February so far. Of course this post is late, and the medal count has already progressed more or less as people would imagine. The Netherlands had an unsurprisingly strong showing in speed skating and this gave them an early spot in the top 5, much to the chagrin of teams 5 times as big. Norway is locked into the top 5 and will not likely be shaken off, Canada has already made up for London 2012 and is now just looking to do some damage in all events (which they will, with the blessings of Harper upon them), and the United States and Russia are looking to make a splash later when they can... good luck to them all, I'd like to have a final paragraph about the media's malice-filled gleeful shit-smearing-storm.
Yeah, we get that the standards of living in Russia are different. Hey, if you'd grown up in a former-communist country that privatized only 23 years ago (wherein the free market SAVED RUSSIA by essentially giving a developing oligarchy the entire country for peanuts... an oppressive, free market capitalist state resulted anyway) and then was barely heard from except in critical mentions of humans rights issues and drug scares, you might not be so surprised by their failures to build a perfect Olympic village in 16 months, or their dirty water (in a country with a river too radioactive to look at, what's rust in the water?). Yeah, there's a reason Russia loves beer. It might be funny if these incidents were isolated in Sochi, if it was backwater status, but it's not, so essentially all these hilarious jokes about Russia being shitty/dirty/scary are jokes at the expense of the most vulnerable people in Russia (gay and straight) who have to live with it (and much worse) all their lives. Yeah, so funny how 'they' barely qualify as 'first-world', itself a hilarious and straightforward concept. But you don't listen though, and instead you're thinking about Putin to the exclusion of everything else. Is he secretly gay? Does he think gay thoughts at night? Is his girlfriend a beard? Why did his wife break up with him? What does he think about the Olympics? The overriding mentality seems to be "russian_traffic.gif" when it should be something a bit more substantial. Oh, but what the fuck do I know? I'm not an expert.
I challenge any NHL player complaining about having to sleep in a dorm with teammates to nut the fuck up. You're at the Olympics, where your prowess as an athlete AND your mental toughness are tested, and if I hear you complain, all the money and fitness in the world won't spare you my disdain. Same goes for just about anyone who is not being actively beaten or oppressed by the Russian Olympic Committee... such a stupid, atavistic, combative attitude coming from western media. No compassion for former communists ('because they used to be the enemy!'), no empathy for anyone who is not cause celebre status. See you at the 2018 Winter Olympics, you bunch of hucksters. Russia beat everyone in the world, including a most vainglorious United States, to the first launch and orbit of an artificial satellite, and the first man in space. People are still miffed about that because capitalism vs. communism is the stupid binary they operate on. They can run to the History Channel and let the real reporters get to work, because this could be a huge global moment (possibly a positive one!) with deep and interesting stories, if only anyone gave enough of a fuck to stop taking cheap shots.
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