Olympic Ceremonies – Fakery or Necessities?

A couple of things came up over the 16 days of the Beijing Olympics that I just thought was ridiculous. The three issues that jump to mind are all from the opening ceremony: the “faked fireworks”, the “lip synced little girl” and the “children of diversity”.

People started reporting in newspapers how the Chinese had faked these events and aren’t they terrible. Well, no, in my opinion. These events were all “produced” to put on a good show. That is what the opening ceremony is, a show.

The fireworks of the feet heading towards the Birdsnest Stadium looked fantastic, it was later reported that they were a special digital effect and they should not have been faked. They were not faked. The fireworks did indeed fire and form feet marching to the stadium. Unfortunately, it was to hard to catch this event on TV and flying a helicopter down into the path of the feet would have been to dangerous. So, for the TV broadcast, they created a digital version and seamlessly blended that footage into the broadcast for the audience at home. Cleaver as far as I’m concerned.

The child lip syncing the song. Okay, China was trying to make an impression and they did change the girl because they thought the new girl was prettier. Do I agree with the decision? Not really, but the show must go on. I feel sorry for the original girl who didn’t get to perform but it wasn’t an earth shattering problem. What seems to have everybody’s testicles in a knot is the fact she was lip syncing – “it was a fake!”, you all scream. Well today in the news it comes out that the Sydney Symphony Orchestra mimed to a backing tape for the 2000 Sydney opening ceremony. The justification from them was that you don’t want anything to go wrong when you are being watched by millions of people worldwide. You can read the article here.

Now the last one is just stupid. During the opening ceremony, a bunch of kids came out in all the different costumes from all the different ethnic regions of China. It was sweet and pretty. Well, now it would seem we are mad because it has come out that the kids all came from the same place and were not actually all the different ethnic origins!! Oh come on! It was suppose to represent all the different ethnic origins, does it really matter if they actually were the costumes that they made? If we did this in Europe and paraded a bunch of kids out in all the different national costumes, nobody would even bat an eyelash if they found out all the kids were German or French or Italian, you would say it was a nice representation.

Let’s get over this. The opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics are not sporting events, we are not looking for cheats here, they are a theater performance.

Well, that’s my two bits worth.