Tag: Olympics

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Sports Sports Feature

Phil’s FESJC

Phil Cannon

This is arguably the greatest week of the year for Memphis sports. Seventy of the finest golfers on the planet arrive in the Bluff City for the FedEx St. Jude Championship, the first of three playoff tournaments to decide the winner of this year’s FedEx Cup. Masters champion Scottie Scheffler will be here. Xander Schauffele — winner of the PGA Championship and the British Open — will be here. So will Rory McIlroy, Jordan Spieth, and Justin Thomas. Memphis is the center of the golf universe for a precious, if humid, weekend.

I always think of Phil Cannon when the FESJC rolls around. We lost the longtime tournament director much too soon (in 2016), but Phil’s imprint on the event lives on, and in ways that go beyond any plaque or statue. The hundreds of volunteers who make you feel like the tournament belongs to you, personally? That’s Phil Cannon’s influence. A media center equipped with every tool a reporter might need to best share a story? That’s Phil Cannon’s influence. And the ongoing bonds between our tournament and both St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and FedEx? That’s Phil Cannon’s priority list, living and breathing, making the FESJC distinct from any other golf tournament in the world.

Phil was the primary source for my very first feature in Memphis Magazine, way back in June 1994. He treated me like a veteran scribe in town for Sports Illustrated. I have little doubt every writer who crossed his path would tell you the same thing. Phil Cannon was a Memphis treasure. When the FESJC makes sports headlines every summer, I’m reminded that he still is.

• The Memphis Redbirds unveiled a new sign on the outfield wall at AutoZone Park last Saturday, a tribute to the 1938 Negro American League champion Memphis Red Sox. It made for a glorious night at the ballpark, Memphis beating Gwinnett, 8-2, while wearing uniforms commemorating the city’s Negro League team of days gone by.

It’s a good start for a franchise and facility that desperately needs to better embrace the history we’ve seen over the ballpark’s first quarter-century. That lone red chair on the right-field bluff? That’s where Albert Pujols (yes, that guy) hit a baseball to win the 2000 Pacific Coast League championship for Memphis. But there’s no plaque to tell a new fan why September 15, 2000, is an important date in Memphis sports history. Just an oddly placed red seat. 

And how about a reminder (poster?) that Yadier Molina played here, and actually caught his first game with Adam Wainwright on the mound at AutoZone Park? (The two broke the major-league record for starts by a battery in 2022.) You might recognize highlights of David Freese from the 2011 World Series. Did you know Freese hit game-winning home runs in the 2009 PCL playoffs, helping Memphis to its second championship? A visual reminder would make AutoZone Park a better, happier place.

• The U.S. Olympic basketball teams (men and women) both brought home gold medals from the Paris Games. Salute to LeBron James, Breanna Stewart, and the many future Hall of Famers who handled the uncomfortable role of heavy favorite and made it to the podium. It makes for a good time to remind voters for the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame that Memphis legend Penny Hardaway is the only member of the 1996 U.S. Olympic team — also gold medalists — not currently enshrined. The only one. Mitch Richmond is in the Hall of Fame, for crying out loud, but not Penny Hardaway. Let’s get this corrected.

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Film Features Film/TV Sports

The Olympic Spectacle

Let’s face it: The Olympics are must-watch television. (Photo: Yalcinsonat | Dreamstime.com)

I’m not a sports fan. Baseball gives me flashbacks to the parade of humiliations that was my Little League career. The constant squeaking sound of sneakers against the floor in basketball games drives me insane. I used to think I liked to watch college football, but in fact I just liked eating fried food with my friends on fall Saturdays. I can do that without the head trauma component. Soccer? Too snoozy. Hockey? Too icy. Golf? Please no.

But I do love the Olympics. The games certainly share many traits that turn me off to professional sports. The massive civic expenditures the host cities have to endure certainly resonates badly with me, a citizen of a city and state that are currently spending hundreds of millions of dollars renovating sports stadiums while we lack a functioning mass transit system. Paris’ leaders seem to have handled that conundrum better than most cities. Many of the stadia and venues are temporary; the only permanent new construction is an aquatics center. In the opening weekend, this fact has made for some spectacular television, like beach volleyball matches played in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. The equestrian events take place on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles. 

The opening ceremonies featured a memorable reference to one of Versailles’ former residents. I’m not sure what kind of opening ceremony I was expecting from the French, but a bloody Marie Antoinette holding her own head while singing a song from the French Revolution with the Gallic metal band Gojira playing on balconies over the Seine was not it. The opening ceremonies are always a mixed bag, at best. The producers have the daunting task of bringing everyone together while making everything seem monumental, and something’s got to give. Paris’ opening ceremonies may just have been the best ever. There was fire, parkour, fashion, art, and a Dionysian bacchanal in the streets of Paris. Instead of marching into the stadium en masse, the teams paraded down the Seine in a flotilla of boats. The only thing that didn’t go according to plan was the rain, which drenched hundreds of dancers along the riverbanks and chased away the crowd. But the driving rain also produced some indelible images, like a regal LeBron James holding the flag aloft at the bow of the American boat like George Washington crossing the Delaware River. 

It was a rainy weekend in Memphis, so I was locked on the couch cramming as many events into my eyeballs as possible. For me, the weirder the sport, the better. I eschewed gymnastics prelims on the opening weekend in favor of rugby sevens. The French men’s team pulled off the upset of the games so far when they won gold in front of a hometown crowd, surviving a squad of swarming Fijians, who had, until Saturday, never lost a game in Olympic history. 

For a professional appreciator of the moving image like myself, the Olympics are a quadrennial update on the state of the photographic arts. The modern games excel at producing beautiful images; the photo editor for The Atlantic reportedly sorted through 25,000 wire photos on Friday. This year, the best television has come not from Paris, but from 9,700 miles away in Tahiti. The surfing competition is being held there on a beach known as Teahupo’o, which translates to “wall of skulls.” With competitors riding 50-foot waves breaking onto a razor-sharp coral reef, it may be the most dangerous event in Olympic history, but it’s super relaxing to watch. 

The camaraderie of the surfers having the rides of their lives while incidentally also competing for gold is the best example of the Olympic spirit. Gathering all of humanity together to see who can run the fastest and jump the highest may seem quaint in our troubled world. But three wars raging across the globe makes the traditional Olympic truce seem like a pretty good idea. The most moving example of peak human performance came from Celine Dion. After being sidelined from the stage for four years due to a rare neurological condition, she closed out the opening ceremony by slaying at a planetary level with Edith Piaf’s “Hymne a l’Amour.” As her fellow NBC broadcasters sat dumfounded, Kelly Clarkson, herself an accomplished singer, struggled through tears to find words for what we had witnessed. It was the most authentic emotion I’ve seen on TV in a long, long time. 

Watch the 2024 Paris Olympics on NBC or Peacock. 

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At Large Opinion

Paris Is Smirking

Photo: Romolo Tavani | Dreamstime.com

“Last night’s mockery of the Last Supper was shocking and insulting to Christian people around the world who watched the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. The war on our faith and traditional values knows no bounds today. But we know that truth and virtue will always prevail.”

That was Speaker of the House (and cosplaying Christian) Mike Johnson responding to the Paris Olympics’ opening ceremony, which featured drag queens and maybe a naked Jesus? I dunno. To be outraged, you really had to be paying close attention, and I wasn’t. But Johnson wasn’t alone in his outrage. Here is a sampling of the reactions on X from folks proclaiming themselves Christians:

“A complete mockery of Christianity. This was by far the most satanic and disgusting ceremony I have ever seen. Do not defy Jesus Christ.”

“The radical left is a greater threat than Iran, China, or Russia will ever be to the United States.”

“A serious POTUS would send our athletes home.”

It went on for two or three days. Elon Musk (who is a Christian now?) unfollowed the Olympics account on X. That will show them.

But here’s my favorite reaction: “France literally gathered its planners and made a list of EVERYTHING that would get under the skin of conservatives and said, ‘Let’s open with ALL of it!’”

To be fair, this last guy was actually onto something. As someone who is married to a French woman and who has spent a lot of time with her family and friends, I can say, without fear of contradiction, that that is precisely how the French would have approached this project. They love pissing off the unsophisticated, tightly wound knobs of the world, i.e. MAGA-Americans.

Don’t believe me? Here’s the artistic director of the opening festivities, Thomas Jolly: “We wanted to include everyone, as simple as that,” he said. “In France, we have freedom of creation, artistic freedom. We are lucky in France to live in a free country. I didn’t have any specific messages that I wanted to deliver. In France, we are a republic; we have the right to love whom we want, we have the right not to be worshippers, we have a lot of rights in France, and this is what I wanted to convey.”

And it makes the joke even funnier when those who are outraged are, well, just ignorant fools. The opening ceremony had nothing to do with Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper but was intended to be a (very) loose recreation of The Feast of the Gods, a 17th-century painting by Dutch artist Jan Hermansz van Bijlert that hangs in the Magnin Museum, in Dijon, France. The painting depicts an assembly of Greek gods, including Dionysus, on Mount Olympus for a banquet to celebrate the marriage of Thetis and Peleus. So no Jesus, no blasphemy, unless you think dressing in drag is satanic, in which case, well, I can’t help you. 

But let’s be clear: There is no war on Christianity. You’re not a victim. You are a member of the U.S.’s largest religious denomination, many times over. It’s also the largest denomination in France. You’re going to be fine. It’s all a matter of perspective: You’re outraged that children were involved in the opening ceremonies. The French, conversely, are outraged that guns are the number-one killer of children in America.

You’re appalled by a headless Marie Antoinette, Lady Gaga, and Celine Dion. The French (and a lot of Americans) were appalled by the appearances of Kid Rock, Amber Rose, Hulk Hogan, and other creeps at the GOP convention two weeks ago. 

You’re upset because you refuse to believe that the French weren’t intentionally blaspheming Jesus Christ and the Last Supper. Yet I’m seeing no outrage from MAGA types over the countless images circulating of Donald Trump being held from behind by a loving blonde Jesus, or even the one that came from a campaign source via email yesterday, of Donald Trump literally hanging on the cross. His loin cloth is an American flag, and Melania is kneeling at his feet. It’s worth a google to see it, if only just to show that blasphemy, like art, is in the eye of the beholder. 

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

The Olympic Ideal Meets Reality In PyeongChang

The first sporting event ever broadcast on television was the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The Olympic movement was four decades old at that point, but, for better or worse, it came of age with the birth of television.

In 2018, the television medium is in a state of flux. The moving pictures on the screen are better than ever, but online streaming is changing the audience’s taste and expectations. Live sports is supposedly what the traditional TV delivery system does best. It’s the strongest argument for the continued existence of the networks and the pay cable system. NBC long ago won the rights to broadcast the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, and its parent company Comcast, which hold the lion’s share of the Memphis broadband duopoly, intends to make the most of the situation. In my case, that meant relentlessly pushing me to send in my old box and take up their new X1 system.

Now, if you’re going to be making the case that your rent-seeking business model is still viable in the Netflix age, your best first move is to deliver a working product. After a promised $50 drop in my monthly rate finally cajoled me into plunging into the hell dimension of frustration and inconvenience that is dealing with Comcast, I ordered the new box on the Xfinity website. Surely, in our current age of techo-wizardry, the city’s largest communications company could deliver a working product to me. After all, my Apple TV was streaming content into my eyeballs only minutes after I hooked it up, and it’s much more complex than a cable set top box. If Comcast is shipping product, they’ve got this stuff nailed down, right?

I was so wrong. It took five days to get my new box up and running. I spoke to no less than six Comcast techs on the phone and two on Twitter.  Day of this seamless process was Super Bowl Sunday, so I missed the big game. Finally, a tech came out to my house and got it running. I asked him why none of the eight people Comcast had put me in contact with had been able to fix the problems. He shrugged, “I guess they didn’t know what they were doing.”

Fortunately, two days later, the South Korean organizers of the PyeongChange Olympics proved that they did know what they were doing. The opening ceremonies came off very smoothly on television, despite the fact that there was an ongoing cyberattack of probable Russian origin trying to derail the festivities.

The games are one of the few moments when the entire world comes together, so there’s always a geopolitical angle to proceedings. This year’s two biggest stories are the Russian team’s banning for a systemic doping program and North and South Korea fielding a unified team. The Russian athletes who could pass drug tests are competing under the Olympic flag, even though the team’s banning was the likely motive behind the cyberattack. As for the two Koreas, they certainly didn’t seem like a people staring down the possibility of a catastrophic war, no matter how Vice President Pence was there to spin it. Maybe you can count that as a win for the Olympic ideal.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I like the Olympics. Yes, there are a lot of things wrong with the way the Olympics are handled and presented in 2018. But there are problems with every human organization and endeavor in 2018. At least someone is taking the Olympic truce seriously. The comity and good sportsman- (sportsperson?) ship of the games seems to be in full effect, temporarily, at least, overcoming the darkness and horror all around us.

As a TV spectacle, this year’s games have already exceeded the glum, vaguely scary 2014 Sochi games. The organizers have fought gusty winds and extreme cold, but the artificial snow has been groomed to perfection, and the competitions have been very well administered. NBC seems to have taken the criticism of the last couple of games to heart, and their coverage is much improved. The commentary is more thoughtful and informative and, crucially, seems to lack the urge to keep talking even when they have nothing to say, with a couple of exceptions such as the women’s snowboarding competition, which was plagued by a chatty announcer as well as a high winds, and downhill skier-turned announcer Bode Miller’s thoughtless comment that a female competitor’s recent struggles were the result of her getting married.

Visually, the games have never looked better. The 4K video brings out incredible detail and contrast in the often washed out white snowy environment. The use of drones has been exceptionally well handled, bringing cross country skiing and the halfpipe snowboarding events new perspectives that add to the depth of viewers’ experience.

With everything going so well, it was immensely jarring when the coverage was interrupted yesterday afternoon with breaking news reports on the latest mass gun slaughter in America, this time in a Florida high school. That night, as victors dedicated their performances to the victims, it felt like the spell had been broken. The Olympic ideal, it seems, is no match for the harshness of American reality.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Politics and the Movies 3: Olympia

If you want to open a can of philosophical worms, watch Olympia.

Leni Riefenstahl filming the famous diving sequences for Olympia in 1936,

I originally decided to add Olympia to my Politics and the Movies series while watching the Olympics. I thought it would be a good way to talk about propaganda, a subject that is more important than ever as we try to sustain democracy in the information age. What better way to approach the subject than tackling the work of Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl?

Her film Triumph of the Will was presented as a documentary of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg, Germany. But, seeing as it was commissioned and paid for by the Hitler regime that had, at that point, only been in power for a year, it’s the textbook example of state propoganda. I don’t know if I can really recommend watching Triumph of the Will (I had to watch it in a film class a long time ago), but you’ve seen echoes of the imagery Riefenstahl created to glorify the Third Reich. The final scene of Star Wars, where the heroes are given medals, is a direct lift from Triumph of the Will. In its opening scenes, Hitler arrives at Nuremberg in an airplane, greeted by a hoard of adoring followers. This has been Donald Trump’s MO through much of his campaign. As quoted in the Wikipedia article about Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl said her instructions from Hitler were, in retrospect, chillingly simple: “He wanted a film which would move, appeal to, impress an audience which was not necessarily interested in politics.”

The iconic long shot of the Nuremberg rally in Triumph Of The Will. George Lucas would later reference this image for the closing scene of the original Star Wars.

Just as today, Hitler was interested in quickly impressing the “low-information voter”. There’s no question that all of Riefenstahl’s work, including Triumph of the Will, is visually beautiful. She had an unerring eye for composition and a strong experimental streak she inherited from the German Expressionist filmmakers with whom she worked as an actress in the 1920s. Triumph of the Will is fascism putting its best foot forward. The appeal of fascism is the natural human urge to belong to a tribe, and for that tribe to be strong. To belong to a tribe means you will be protected, and that difficult questions such as “What is my place in the world?” and “What will I do when I grow up?” have easy answers. Fascism promises to ease the psychic pain of being an individual in a chaotic world.

Riefenstahl’s images of nude athletes were inspired by classical Greek statues.

Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels were so impressed with Triumph of the Will that they commissioned Riefenstahl to create a documentary about the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. The modern games had been going on for 40 years at that point, but no one had ever made a serious attempt at filming them before. Riefenstahl set about the task with typical forethought and attention to detail. One of the many innovations the Nazis brought to the Olympics was the torch relay, and Olympia uses it as a powerful opening sequence to connect the world of classical Greece to the present of 1936.

The torch lighting sequence from Olympia.

Here’s the thing about Olympia: It looks like pretty much every Olympics you’ve seen on television. Or rather, all of the ways you have seen The Olympics on television were invented by Leni Riefenstahl as part of a Nazi propaganda film. She uses slow motion, extreme close ups of the athlete’s faces and bodies, candid footage of competitors warming up and chatting before events, and shots of the crowd cheering for their countries favorites. (The “USA! USA!” chant was already familiar to the crowd, but the one laugh out loud moment for me was a chant by English track and field fans: “We want you to win!”) There’s plenty of rooting for the home team, too. Different cuts of the movie were released in English and French. The cut of Olympia available on YouTube is the original German, and the Nazi athletes are referred to as “our men.” But it’s ultimately much less biased than NBC’s primetime coverage of the gymnastics competitions, where it sometimes looked like the Americans were the only ones competing. Propaganda works because people like it.

Jesse Owens in Olympia

But Olympia fails at its mission of being pure Nazi propaganda. Hitler wanted the 1936 games to prove his theories of Aryan racial superiority, but he didn’t count on Jesse Owens, one of the greatest athletes who ever lived, and who just happened to be both American and black. In Olympia, Owens doesn’t just win his races, he demolishes the competition in a way not seen again until Usain Bolt took to the track. Riefenstahl doesn’t sugar coat it, even for German audiences. People who have never done any film or video editing don’t realize how much power the editor has. Riefenstahl was working with hundreds of hours of candid footage shot by a small army of cameramen. It would have been easy to pick images of Owens when he was badly lit, or grimacing, or, like NBC did with the non-American gymnasts, just edit him out entirely. Riefenstahl does none of that. It’s clear from Olympia that Owens was the most physically fit person on the field, and he had kind, intelligent eyes and a magnetic smile to boot. Riefenstahl’s camera loves him. And it’s not just Owens. American distance runner John Woodruff won a dramatic 800 meter race with a combination of daring strategy and sheer speed. He was also black. The Japanese won gold and bronze in the marathon. Indians, Africans, South Americans are all represented among the athletic excellence Riefenstahl filmed. The humanist message of the games shines through the layers of attempted propaganda, giving Olympia a remarkable, and perhaps unique, tension.

Jesse Owens prepares to set a world record at the Berlin Olympics.

The examples of beautiful art created by loathsome individuals lie thick on the ground all around us. Pablo Picasso was perhaps the 20th century’s greatest visual genius, but you wouldn’t want your sister to date him. Ezra Pound, who not only wrote incredible poetry of his own but also edited T.S. Eliot, was much more clearly a true Fascist believer than Riefenstahl. Must we throw out “The Wasteland”? In film, there’s Roman Polanski, whose Chinatown is on the shortlist of the greatest films ever made, but who has been on the run from a statutory rape conviction since 1977. Woody Allen is widely admired as a filmmaker, but he had an affair with and ultimately married his adoptive stepdaughter. Does that make Manhattan any less of a film? Right now, the most anticipated film of the fall is Birth Of A Nation, a drama about the Nat Turner slave rebellion that sold at Sundance for the largest amount ever paid for an indie film. When it came to light that director Nate Parker was accused of rape in 2001, and his accuser committed suicide in 2012, the American Film Institute cancelled a scheduled screening. I haven’t seen the film, but if Parker, who was acquitted in a trial, really was guilty, does that automatically mean the film is bad and should not be viewed? Are the Olympics tainted because the techniques and images that made the games an icon of modernity came from a Nazi propagandist? Democracies use propaganda, too, and advertising has perfected the techniques Riefenstahl pioneered. The tools are neutral, it is the purpose to which they are put that matters.

Adolf Hitler and Leni Riefenstahl.

Since I believe that authorial intent is secondary to audience reaction in the creation of meaning, I tend to advocate separating the artist from the art. So what to make of Riefenstahl? If you’ve ever tried to raise money to make a film—or raise capital to start any kind of business, for that matter—you might have found yourself in a situation where you had to decide whether or not to take money from an unsavory character. Filmmakers in the Hollywood system constantly find themselves in a position where they must compromise their visions in favor of their financiers political whims. When I wrote a paper on Riefenstahl in college, I came away with the impression of a woman whose primary motivation was making beautiful images, and who was willing to let the ideological chips fall where they may. But that doesn’t excuse Triumph of the Will. Some bridges are just too far to cross. 

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Olympic Fever Dream 2016

Pro Tip: If you have to be sick, try to be sick during the Olympics.

I first discovered this pro tip during the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino while recovering from hernia surgery. There is no better sport to nod off in a demerol haze to than curling. The experience was so positive (or at least as positive as recovering from major thoracic surgery can be), that when the doctor told me I had a massive hernia on the other side of my body, I scheduled the surgery around the 2014 Sochi games.

Pro Tip #2: opt for the robotic hernia surgery.

In 2012, when web streaming was becoming more practical, I endeavored to watch every event of the London games for a Flyer article. Between then and the Sochi games, I started to understand what experienced sports journalists are talking about when they say every Olympics has a different atmosphere. London had been a little stuffy, but uplifting; Sochi was ominous and vaguely dystopian.

OPENING CEREMONIES
The lead up to Rio had been a string of bad news: The rowers would be churning through sewage, Zika virus was going to be rampant, and the Brazilian government was literally collapsing just as the opening ceremony was looming. I was planning on catching as much of the games as I could, but my schedule was pretty busy, so I was going to keep it casual. Then my wife and I both woke up on Friday morning with a horrifying stomach flu, so my busy weekend turned into Olympic Fever Dream 2016.

We can’t run any pics from the Olympics, so here’s the rings.

The opening ceremonies had three directors, including Fernando Meirelles, the Brazilian filmmaker who created the harrowing 2002 Rio crime epic City Of God. Working with a tiny fraction of the budgets Beijing and London had, they chose to lean heavily on projection mapping. You can see a much smaller scale example of projection mapping at the Crosstown Arts gallery this weekend with Fish, which, like much of the opening ceremony, uses a system of overlapping projectors throwing digitally manipulated images to create its illusions.

Maybe it was a result of my 100-degree fever, but I thought the program, which traced the entire history of human habitation in the Amazon basin and ended with a call for action against climate change, was superior to both better-funded recent examples. Rio’s secret weapon is Brazil’s incredible musical culture, and the beats didn’t stop with the end of the opening ceremony. Every event came with a live soundtrack of local musicians, and as far as I’m concerned Brazil has earned the gold medal in dancing. Despite the encroaching chaos of the outside world, the samba-infected mood of these games is loose and jubilant.

CYCLING THROUGH THE FUTURE

The story of Olympics coverage in the 21st century has been one of rapidly advancing digital video technology. 2008 was year HD came to Olympics, and the unwritten story this year has been the advent of 4K video. For the vast majority of viewers, its still being served in 1080 HD streams, but TV has never looked better than this. The colors are deep and varied, the blacks crunchy. Details in the foreground and background are constantly popping out you. What was an uncanny trick shot four years ago—such as the uncanny double images of underwater swimmers caused by reflections from the surface—now occurs in almost every swim heat.

The technical advances were immediately evident on Saturday at the Men’s 150 KM Bicycle Road Race. Cycling has always been a difficult sport to cover because of the speeds and distances involved, and only in recent years has it become practical to transmit digital HD video from a moving motorcycle. The combination of point-of-view images with drone and helicopter footage made for incredibly exciting viewing experience, and NBC used it very effectively to tell the story of a truly epic athletic contest. The race took six hours, and it was closely contested all the entire time. The course wound through the mountains surrounding Rio, and commentators were calling it the most difficult in Olympic history. The race was a brutal war of attrition, with riders bouncing on century-old cobblestones and dodging the shrapnel of their crashed competitors. Australian Richie Porto pulled himself off the pavement and tried to continue racing with a broken collarbone. The final few kilometers was a plunge from Fort Copacabana so steep and twisty the three leaders pulled away from the chase motorcycles, tightening the suspense for a breathless moment until the camera rounded a corner to reveal a pair of racers sprawled across the road. The survivor of the pile up was Rafael Majka, a two-time Tour de France King Of The Mountain winner who held a big lead when the course straightened out for the final sprint, only to settle for bronze after a pack of riders ran him down like wolves taking down a buffalo.

The same narrative played out the next day with the women’s road race, which was even more intense. Dutch cyclist Annemie van Vleuten was cruising down the mountain toward the gold when her tire slipped on drizzle slicked pavement and she crashed headfirst into a concrete curb on live television. Despite a severe concussion and three cracked vertebrae, she tweeted from the intensive care unit that she was bummed she crashed just when she was having the race of her life.

STREAMING MESS

So here we are in 2016. Everyone’s got an Apple TV or Roku or Chromecast hooked up to their flatscreen. We’ve got the whole streaming thing cracked, right? This year we’ll be able to see any Olympic even we want live over the web, right?

Nope.

The NBC streaming experience, both on the web site and through the Apple TV app, has been a total mess. The streams have been coming through clear, but you’re not always sure what you’re going to get when you click on an icon, because the labeling and times have been obscure and inaccurate. Early in the week, the automatic ad serving on the stream was so bad it ruined the Women’s Epee competition by covering most of the action with Samsung commercials.

As the games progressed, the ad serving situation seemed to get better. Many of the streamed events don’t have any commentary. This can be a problem for something like judo, where the line between winning and losing is unclear to the casual viewer. But with something like archery, where the objective is clear, the lack of narration really brought into focus how much the drama mongering, narrative based coverage is totally false.

Archery matches are great single-serving sports experiences. Sets go quickly, so there’s lots of scoring, lead changes, and tension. The arcs of the arrows ending with a satisfying “thunk” at the target makes for great television. Archers have a much wider variety of body types than, say, gymnasts. For every willowy Eastern European demigoddess looking like they’ve just come from the Wild Hunt, there’s a sturdy, kind-eyed math teacher type. The sport is also a great example of how quickly the Olympics can transform you into an armchair expert. I found myself getting blasé about 8s and 9s, even though any of these kind-eyed math teacher types could easily kill me with a single arrow from a quarter mile away.

FALSE AND TRUE NARRATIVES

Modern sports coverage and its obsession with psychological narratives goes back to Roone Arledge’s tenure at ABC sports in the 70s. It can be useful and truthful, as was the case with American Judo gold medalist Kayla Harrison. There are a lot of different ways to lose a judo match that fall short of losing consciousness, and it helps to have an expert explain the action. And Harrison’s story is genuinely compelling: She was sexually abused by her first coach, but recovered to become and activist and two-time gold medalist. She’s the former sparring partner of UFC superstar Rhonda Rousey, and she’s facing pressure to follow her friend into the more violent, lucrative sport, but that would mean giving up her calling to be a firefighter. It’s a genuine moral dilemma! 

Elsewhere, though, NBC’s attempts to drum up drama have been intrusive and unnecessary, and they seem unable to adapt when their preferred narrative is proven false. The US Women’s Gymnastic Team may be the greatest assemblage of athletes in their sport’s history, and they show every outward sign of having a healthy, supportive team relationship. Commentators repeatedly attempted to tease out jealousies and interpersonal drama, but the team’s performance was so dominant and Olympic in spirit that the women’s sheer virtue became the dominant story.

The pool was the arena for the games’ greatest heroics so far. Hungarian swimmer Katinka Hosszu won three gold medals in the grueling individual medley and backstroke events, breaking both Olympic and world records in the process. American Katie Ledecky left everyone in her wake winning three golds and a silver in dominant fashion. Simone Manuel created one of the games’ most transcendent images when she became the first African American woman to win a gold medal in a swimming event.

Then there’s Michael Phelps. At age 31—ancient by Olympic swimmer standards—his performance in the pool made a strong case that Phelps is the greatest Olympian of all time. Not only has he won a completely unprecedented 22 gold medals in the course of his storied career, but his win in the 200 Meter Individual Medly race put his lifetime individual medal count at 13. The former record for total lifetime individual gold medals was 12, and it was held by a man known only as Leonidas of Rhodes, a runner who won his ultimate medal at Olympia in 152 B.C.E. 2,168 years ago. There is much that needs changing in the modern Olympics, but Rio has so far lived up to the Olympian ideal. It’s a celebration of humanity’s greatness, spanning the long millennia, and now served to your Roku in brilliant 4K video.  

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News The Fly-By

Memphis Curling Club Hopes to Grow Through Exposure, Education

CREDIT: Toby Sells

Greg Roberson wants to put Memphis on ice.

Curling hooked the Memphis musician a decade ago and he’s now looking to hook locals on the sport, too.

Americans typically only see curling during the Winter Olympics, during which they’ll see a player slide a large, rounded stone down a long lane of bright, white ice. Then, two other players will sweep the ice in front of the stone, hoping to land it onto what looks like an archery target at the other end of the lane.

“I find that people have seen it on the Olympics, but they don’t quite understand it,” said Roberson.

Toby Sells

Greg Roberson

But he’s hoping to change the minds of Mid-Southerners with a series of Learn to Curl events that get underway this weekend at the Mid-South Ice House in Olive Branch. The first two Saturday events (April 11th and 18th) have sold out. But slots are still available for Saturday, April 25th. The two-hour lessons cost $15 per person.

Roberson hopes the events (which have been hosted at the Ice House since 2012) will jump-start the curling scene in Memphis as feeders into the Memphis Curling Club. The club’s spring league begins at the end of April and the summer league will run from July to August. Roberson hopes these leagues will snowball Memphis curling into an avalanche.

“The Atlanta club started with eight people four years ago and now it has more than 100 people in it,” Roberson said.

The Memphis club has already drawn a broad array of locals, Roberson said, from doctors, engineers, musicians, writers, housewives, and college students. He envisions a curling scene here that includes teams from corporations, bars, fraternities, sororities, universities, high schools, and more.

Curling is certainly not mainstream in Memphis or the South, for that matter. But it got an acknowledgment here as a sport (or at least a healthy activity) from the Church Health Center (CHC). The clinic recently added curling to its list of approved activities for its employee wellness program. If employees go to a Learn to Curl event, they get points that could earn them an extra paid day off.

“Curling is an Olympic sport so it would definitely qualify for physical activity [in our program],” said Kimberly Barksdale Baker, a manager at the CHC’s Wellness Center. “We know that curling increases your strength, flexibility, and your overall endurance.”

Roberson is aware that curling has a ways to go in Memphis. But for anyone on the fence about getting started, he offered this advice:

“I’d tell them to spend $15, bring a clean pair of shoes [no leather soles] and maybe a windbreaker and come on out and learn to curl,” Roberson said. “We’ll spend two hours, give you some instruction, we’ll play a short game, and you can actually get a chance to do it.”

Categories
Opinion

Memphis Invited to Bid for 2024 Olympics

The United States Olympic Committee has invited Memphis to make a pitch for the 2024 Olympics. Really.

A letter to Mayor A C Wharton, released by his office Wednesday, says “we are reaching out to cities that have previously expressed an interest in bidding as well as the cities in the largest 25 U.S. markets.”

The 1996 Olympics was in Atlanta. The U.S. made bids, unsuccessfully, to host the 2012 Olympics in New York and the 2016 Olympics in Chicago.

“Both New York and Chicago had to participate in a domestic bid process that cost upwards of $10 million before they were designated by the USOC as an IOC Applicant City,” the letter says.

As for the the games themselves, “The staging of the games is an extraordinary undertaking for any city, with operating budgets in excess of $3 billion, not including costs associated with venue construction and other infrastructure.”

Among the requirements are 45,000 hotel rooms, an Olympic Village that sleeps 16,500 and has a 5,000-person dining hall, operations space for 15,000 media members, an international airport that can handle thousands of international passengers a day, and a workforce of up to 200,000.

“While the Games require a formidable commitment, they also provide an unparalleled opportunity for a city to evolve and grow,” the letter says. “The games have had a transformative impact on a number of host cities, including Barcelona, Beijing, and London.”

Well, now. Many thoughts come to mind. Here are a few. Feel free to add on.

1. Only if Germantown and Lakeland will join in.
2. $3 billion? If only they had only called a week ago!
3. Got the airport and a skate park.
4. Game Changer.
5. Wonder how many of these letters went out.
6. Only if wrestling is back in.
7. And squash gets in.
8. Does a hotel room in Little Rock, Nashville, or Knoxville count?
9. Reply “tell us more” and see what happens.
10. Spam

Categories
Opinion

Flat World, No; Flat Field, Yes

Myron Lowery is not running for president.

As a gag, the Memphis city councilman sent out an e-mail purporting to distance himself from an upstart “Myron Lowery For President” movement at the Democratic National Convention, which starts Monday in Denver.

“I’m trying to stop some of my friends from placing my name in nomination for president,” Lowery says in the e-mail. He is a superdelegate to the convention.

The do-it-yourself video link — variations of which have been circulating for several weeks — features a bogus television reporter for “News 3” talking about “a growing grassroots movement born on the Internet to elect a virtual unknown to the office of president.”

The video clip has all the requisite features, including a talk-show host and former model, mock political analyst Dr. Arnold Franklin, a reporter spouting inanities about “people from all walks of life,” and a grandmother who turns her butt to the camera and displays a “Lowery for President” tattoo on her bare lower back.

I confess that it didn’t seem implausible. Lowery, a former television news reporter and anchor, has run or thought about running for political positions including convention delegate, council member, Charter Commission member, and mayor.

The list of people who really sought or are seeking the Democratic presidential nomination this year includes (in addition to Barack Obama) D.R. Hunter, Willie Carter, Randy Crow, Lee Mercer, Frank Lynch, and Grover Cleveland Mullins. And, of course, Stephen Colbert. Why not Myron?

“You were not alone,” Lowery told me this week. He said he showed the spoof to fellow council member Janis Fullilove, and “she looked at it and her mouth dropped.”

Lowery has been to every Democratic convention but one since 1988. He has been a delegate four times. Next week he is supporting Obama, although he began the year as a Hillary Clinton supporter.

“I will not be voting for her” when her name is placed in nomination, despite several entreaties from Hillary diehards to remain true, Lowery says.

In a way, that’s too bad. National political conventions need some drama and unscripted suspense. There used to be actual battles over who would get the nomination, what the platform committee would do, whether a peace plank would be adopted, and whether some state’s delegates would walk out.

Now the conventions are giant four-day parties for political insiders. They’re programming for television between the Summer Olympics and the start of the new fall shows. Watching them is a little like attending the Memphis in May barbecue contest as a spectator and watching the tents full of people drinking, cooking, eating, and having fun.

If the Democrats or Republicans want a plank for their platform that really gets people excited, they should support moving up the opening weekend of the college football season to the first week of August, damn the heat, baseball, and summer vacation. Give red-blooded Americans what we want.

We’ve overdosed on the Olympics, and there is almost another week to go. We know way too much about Shawn Johnson’s quest for the elusive gold, about Misty and Kerri and Phil and Todd and beach volleyball, about synchronized diving and the secret to Chinese dominance.

I don’t want to read another Geoff Calkins column about the danger of cycling in Beijing, the brilliance of the Chinese in ping-pong, or the lovable losers of swimming. I don’t want to watch Bob Costas, with the seriousness of a judge at a murder trial, question Bela Karolyi about the unfairness of gymnastics judging or see Brian Williams and Katie Couric coming to you from the Bird’s Nest.

I don’t want to watch conventions orchestrated in every detail as the culmination of an endless campaign to pick the leader of the free world, appease the Clintons, and choose a running mate for a job once compared to “a bucket of warm spit.”

I don’t want a flat world and global marketing and China against the U.S.

I want a flat field and Ole Miss against Memphis, surrounded by a crowd of people screaming about something that pretends to no more or less importance than first downs, interceptions, touchdowns, and bragging rights.

Let the real games begin.

Categories
Sports Sports Feature

Red August

I spent 10 days in China in October 1994 as a member of a press junket previewing the Wonders exhibition “Imperial Tombs of China.” It was the closest thing to a “red October” I’ll likely see. That journey is as distant from Western perceptions of communism as my memory can recall. Needless to say, the government officials who hosted our wide-eyed party of journalists were on their A game, just as all of China should be when the Olympic Games open in Beijing Friday. But whatever lengths may have been pursued 14 years ago to close the gap between East and West — between perception and reality, one might argue — are among the components of the continued efforts to bridge opposite sides of the world and balance the relationship between the last two “super powers” our planet is likely to host.

Whether in Hong Kong (then still a British territory), Xi’an (where jaw met floor as my party walked among the long-buried terra-cotta army of Emperor Qin Shi-huang-di), or Beijing (we took a short bus ride to the Great Wall), my memories of China start with the crowds. Walking around the Forbidden City one afternoon, it always seemed like a ball game had just finished, with the departing fans filling sidewalks and streets, cars and cabs bumper-to-bumper, pedestrians young and old eager to get to their next destination.

But the crowds were invariably friendly. My group stood out in China, even with a contingent of guides and translators. Adding a significant language barrier, those of us from the Mid-South were curiosities but only until the first smile was exchanged.

I call on these happy reflections, because I’d like to believe that the controversy that follows any Western discussion of China — be it over Tibet, Darfur, or human rights in general — can become part of the international hug that every Olympic gathering aims to be and not the central distraction (violent or otherwise) we remember from Beijing ’08. China has room for improvement as it gains ground on the developed world — and it’s gaining fast — but so does every nation with interests that stretch global harmony. An open mind on the part of Olympic athletes should be enough to inspire open minds on the part of traveling sports fans, journalists, dare I say even diplomats and heads of state. Yes, China must improve its treatment of all its people. That improvement will come quicker through dialogue — which starts with a visit to Beijing — than it will through finger-pointing or threats of international action.

A significant bonus during my visit to Beijing was a college friend joining me from his home in Tokyo. A Japanese native, Tamio moved to America in elementary school, graduated with a degree in economics from Tufts, and returned to Japan not long before my press junket. He emphasized during our travels that wherever I go, wherever I live, when I read about China now, it will feel closer to home. And he was absolutely right.

There was a free night we had in Beijing, in which Tamio and I bravely took to the streets without our formal supervisors or translators. We happened upon a small restaurant (maybe five tables) not too far from the Forbidden City. If there were other diners in that restaurant, I don’t remember them. What I do recall is the most energetic and friendly wait staff I’ve seen before or since (and, alas, a bathroom upstairs that was outdoors and alongside a fire escape). Tamio and I enjoyed a full meal — rice, dumplings, some chicken and vegetables, and a tasty bottle of red wine. All for five American dollars. I’ve tried to do the economics on this for 14 years now and still can’t grasp how fundamentally different two societies are when a meal in one would cost 10 times what it does in another.

Suffice to say, that same meal in central Beijing would cost more than $5 today, and it’ll cost much more 14 years from now. It’s but a tiny sample of a gap being closed, a bridge being slowly built between East and West. And over the next two weeks, as, couch-bound, I watch runners, swimmers, and gymnasts compete for the world’s attention, China will, indeed, feel quite close to home.

Frank Murtaugh is managing editor of Memphis magazine and writes the “From My Seat” column for memphisflyer.com.