“Given the economic backdrop, for some the opening ceremony should consist of just an open top bus with Colin Firth, JK Rowling and the Beckhams on it waving,” he wrote Nick Hornby, in a nice article published in the Wall Street Journal.
There is a strange climate around the Olympics, and not just because London is rainier than ever these days. It is one of the effects of the crisis, this climate (not the rain, although perhaps the government is a thief), the metallic screech that a $42 million inaugural ceremony produces as it enters the gears of the recession, a grandeur that slaps everything else.
In the midst of the haze in the London sky different winds blow, the expectation of something imminent, a precarious air of economic panic and the end of the world: 70% humidity, risk of precipitation and spread at 475.
Each Olympics is an event rooted in its time, an event capable of recounting its days and marking where the world is. London 2012 is the Olympics of this precise moment, the Olympics of a Greek athlete (Voula Paraskevi Papachristou) who is sent home for writing a racist comment on Twitter, lTotal Entropic TV Coverage Olympiad, a 15-channel chaos in which the uniqueness of the moment in which history is written risks being lost, confused among millions of other moments that mimic it, the Olympics of increasingly global and increasingly rich super-athletes, captained, in the box office rankings, by Lebron James and Roger Federer, two that couldn't be more different, but which in the end are the same thing, two great champions and, even more, two beautiful icons of our time.
London 2012 is Bolt's Olympics, the only truly planetary phenomenon in athletics, who will have to beware of his friend Blake's run-up, and this time he will have to get his elbows dirty to win, as he can no longer walk on clouds, the Olympics of Phelps and Lochte, Mark Cavendish and our own Federica Pellegrini, the Olympics of Neymar who will try to lead Brazil to the victory of the only football laurel that it inexplicably lacks.
London 2012 is all this, but it is also more. The president of Coni Petrucci said he hopes that these days we are talking about medals and not about spreads. It probably will. We will watch the races and all the rest, getting passionate about the athletes, their victories and also their loves (as happened for the Pellegrini-Magnini couple), the gossip of the beautiful and healthy and rich and famous, to forget about ourselves, since sport, as a new religion, has become the opium of the people and a panacea for ills.
Sport is also the affirmation of a power (the US hegemony, sporting as well as economic-cultural, undermined first by the Soviet Union and today by the Chinese run-up), but at the same time it is the field in which a submissive people can raise their heads, showing his pride in a ransom that goes beyond sport to become social.
We have seen it in recent months, after Italy's victory over Germany at the European Championships, celebrated with Libero's very elegant Vaffankermel, or with Alonso's words after the last Grand Prix, a perfect synthesis, "A Spanish driver who winning in Germany on an Italian car is a fantastic thing”.
London savors every moment with gusto, as if it were a delicious dinner in an overpriced restaurant, wondering with every delicious bite if it will eventually make it to pay the bill. The serious risk is that this Olympics will become a photograph that is already old the moment it is taken, a grandiose event destined to crystallize an era that was already over.
The FIRSTonline survey on the most representative Italian athletes of London 2012
