Two hours of parading nations later, IOC president Thomas Bach stood on the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony stage and did his best to justify the Olympic ideal in 2022, a year more surreal than m…
opening ceremony stage and did his best to justify the Olympic ideal in 2022, a year more surreal than most. “Division, conflict, and mistrust are on the rise,” Bach said. “[But] we show the world, yes, it is possible to be fierce rivals, but at the same time living peacefully and respectfully together.”
This sentiment, nice though it is, might come as a surprise to those in the stadium, those not allowed anywhere near it, and those who boycotted the Games as a matter of political protest. With the host country under a microscope for reported human rights abuses and a new alliance against the United States with Vladimir Putin’s Russia,had no choice but to alternate its giddy coverage of Team U.S.A. with dire reminders of this particularly fraught world stage.
The pressing dilemma of how to cover these specific Olympics was inevitable. While the U.S. government decided on a diplomatic boycott, NBC and the U.S. delegation did not. Given how much money and work is always at stake with the Olympics, that never seemed to be an option either the network or delegation ever seriously considered.
For the opening ceremony, NBC’s solution to this problem largely came down to the hiring of two new correspondents — Bloomberg News’ Andy Brown and Yale professor Jing Tsu — who could bring in their China expertise to contextualize the propaganda onscreen. Brown and Tsu did their best to bring appropriate gravitas to the situation, and to their and Savannah Guthrie’s credit, they did not shy away from using the word “genocide” to describe the treatment of China’s Uyghur Muslim population.
If NBC is to keep airing these Olympics, it’s hard to say how much more the network can conceivably do to contextualize the extraordinary geopolitical circumstances in which they’re taking place. Guthrie wrapped the opening ceremony coverage with a succinct reminder that what we just saw was a show in which artistic and political considerations converged.
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