The Olympic Games Go Hollywood

Now that the Paris Olympics are history, I can go back to watching movies instead of international sporting events. But I must say I fully enjoyed 16 days of stirring competition, despite the sometimes smarmy NBC coverage and (of course) the endless commercials. The games themselves were mostly a delight: exciting outcomes, lots of sideline drama, and the most beautiful locations imaginable. (How can L.A. in 2028 possibly hope to compete with those shots of the Eiffel Tower? Honestly, the plugs at the end of the late-night broadcast for our next Olympic Games made my birth city look gorgeous, though I’ve learned that a lot of the hoopla on the beach was filmed not in L.A. or Santa Monica but some miles down the freeway in Long Beach.) 

 Once upon a time, I was lucky to attend the closing ceremonies of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games. It was a simpler era, with less demand for outsized spectacle. The highlights, as I remember them, included the finale of the first-ever women’s Olympic marathon: we all cheered for the last-place finisher as she staggered painfully into the Coliseum, clearly ailing but waving off medical help because she was determined to finish the race. There was also Lionel Ritchie singing about partying as though it were 1999 (that date seemed so far off!). And the Joffrey Ballet (then L.A.-based) performed in tandem with a Korean dance troupe, as a prelude to 1988 in Seoul.

 One thing that surprised me about Paris 2024 was the TV coverage’s repeated emphasis on Hollywood stars in the stands. The NBC cameras picked out the celebs: Nicole Kidman, Natalie Portman, Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, et al. Then of course there was the constant intrusion of ageing rapper Snoop Dog, sometimes with his BFF (really!) Martha Stewart. True, Snoop does come off as surprisingly endearing, but I would have strongly preferred coverage of some of the more obscure sports and some of the more exotic national teams. I’m sure they had their own stories to tell.

 At the Paris closing ceremony, following a rather overblown dance-drama about the resurrection of the Olympic games of ancient Greece, we moved into an L.A. state of mind via a memorable stunt that underscored the Hollywood aspects of Southern California.  It featured none other than Tom Cruise, plunging into the stadium from on high, grabbing the Olympic flag, and roaring off on a handy motorcycle, heading through the streets of Paris to an L.A.-bound plane. What fun! But also a promise that LA 2028 would be heavily invested in Hollywood star culture.

 Which made me muse  about how many movies have used the Olympics as their climax. Some have been silly (like Walk, Don’t Run, a wildly exaggerated look at Tokyo 1964 that featured race-walking and Cary Grant). Some have been stirring, like The Boys in the Boat and (best of the lot) Chariots of Fire. Of course there have been documentaries too. The most notorious is Olympia, the portrait of the 1936 Munich games by Adolf Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl. Tasked with glorifying the Fatherland, she introduced brilliant camera techniques that are still widely used today. She also included plenty of awe-inspiring Hitler footage, but couldn’t resist according the same admiring gaze to the Black American athlete Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals in track and field events.

 It used to be that newly-minted Olympic champions went to Hollywood and got turned into movie stars. Like Johnny (Tarzan) Weissmuller and skating cutie Sonja Henie. But it didn’t always work. Remember the acting career of Mark Spitz?