Wrong. You’ve all got it all wrong. The modern Olympics movement was a bad idea from the start. I’m going to riff on the sins of De Coubertin and his dream over the next week or so. But for now I want to focus on the true and real glory of the Olympics: the opening ceremony.

Over the years I have become a connoisseur of opening ceremonies. Before the scandals, the disgraces and the national failures (I’m English, I’m used to it) that characterise athletic contests, the ceremony provides a moment of promise, anticipation and optimism. The organisers pump the affect up to the max: bludgeoning us into believing that all is right in their world (wot, no oppression here, no way guv), our world, and that we’re all part of it, living the dream, dreaming our lives, and our next holiday will be in Beijing. It’s a party political broadcast on behalf of the host nation-state, a chance to impress, convince and fill hotel beds. It sets the tone for the Games. And it tells us so much about the nation-state, not just in intentional revelation, but in (literally) spectacular Freudian slips.

At its best the opening ceremony is a work of art. Phillipe Decoufle’s choreography for the opening of the 1992 Albertville Winter Olympics was breathtaking. It transcended any crude notion of nationalism, replacing it instead with a surreal and stunning combination of contemporary dance, circus wizardry and visual trickery. How very subtle. How very very French.

At its worst it’s even better. The opening of the 1986 Commonwealth Games will remain forever etched in the memories of those fortunate enough to have witnessed it, although I assume there are some bampots out there who regard it as stain on the great Scottish Nation [aside: as I sit here typing, the Scottish bagpipe music soundtracking the Beijing Ceremony is a serendipitous illustration of the unintentional spectacle of the absurd]. The 1986 Games was plagued by difficulties. It wasn’t just the poor organisation, which resulted in the surreal decision to appoint “Captain” Bob Maxwell to steer them to a safe harbour (Hmmm, not the best of sailors). It was the boycott.

Ah the Dark Days of Maggie Thatcherism (obliterate my memory please ?) and the Iron Lady’s unwillingness to condemn sporting relations with aparthied South Africa. The result was a boycott that made the Games fifth-rate (the usual standard of the Commonwealth Games is third). Undeterred by this the organisers proceeded to produce an opening ceremony that contained every cliche of Scottishness known to man, and a few known only to the Scots. Bagpipes endless, Jimmy wigs, kitsch kilts, undisguised John Brown tractors pulling cartloads of proto-Neds celebrating the “Spirit of Youth” (and I don’t mean Buckfast).

YouTube has a few clips that don’t even touch the horror the ceremony–apart, that is, from the proto-Neds. In my memory (heh Kids, Memory IS unreliable, and I was probably drunk–Kaliber was a major sponsor of the game and someone had to kick against the pricks).

The culmination of the ceremony was a huge blow-up Nessie pulled by the obligatory tractor [oh my god the pipes are back]. It was appalling. It was splendid, like the Charge of the Light Brigade of Opening Cermonies.

And your point caller?

I sit here and watch the perfect choreography of the Beijing Opening Ceremony. I observe the Chinese rightfully reclaim their history from the Orientalists, and re-establish their place as the Middle Kingdom in the centre of the world: the inventors of Traditional Chinese Medicine, gunpowder, paper, print and the Wu-Tang Clan.

I watch a little girl sing movingly. She’s so cute. I watch regimented day-glo drummers and wonder what might happen if one of them put a stick out place. And I watch goose-stepping troops march the national flag to the podium–no sense of irony, no sense of history, no sense that perhaps this was dangerous nonsense perpetrated previously by another government in another time, who also happily combined authoritarian socialism with the competitive industrialised corporations. And, BTW, hosted an Olympics before WWII. And I wonder if awarding Berlin the Olympics was motivated by the policy and spirit of appeasement.

Eerie thoughts: that small section of empty seats behind where the goals would’ve been if football was the game; where had the spectators gone? As an undergraduate I had a rather a dour lecturer of some brilliance and charisma. He had been an enforcer, a shit-kicker, for the National Union of Miner Workers in his previous life (you didn’t ask HIM for an extension). He had a disclosed admiration for the Chinese Communist Party’s criminal justice policy. If they steal, shoot ‘em. [The bloody bagpipes are back] . I think I prefer Edinburgh 1986. May the bagpipes rule the Games now and forever more.

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