Beijing Olympics Closing Ceremony Review: Lumbering Event Gives Geopolitical Tensions Short Shrift; Ciao To Italy 2026

deadline.com:

Despite all the high-tech tricks, political posturing and pyrotechnics, the best part of the Closing Ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics proved to be the athletes.Competing the past two weeks amidst rising international tensions, pandemic quarantines and with a heavy-handed host, the participants injected a bit of fun this morning into the tightly scripted affair.

Following the traditional flag waving parade of nations into the reasonably full Bird’s Nest, American flag-bearer, Elana Meyers Taylor and her fellow masked team members from around the globe let off some stream cavorting on the giant stadium’s floor to a loop of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ode To Joy over the protests of Chinese officials who repeatedly asked everyone to take their seats.This year’s Winter Olympics was unique in many ways, but it may not be a bad idea for future games to let the actual athletes rule the roost more often.Certainly it would be a vast improvement in comparison to this year’s stilted closing ceremony.

Starting out an rendition of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” amidst a clustered of shiny coated children on ice and ending with fireworks disingenuously proclaiming “One World” in the sky and an “Auld Lang Syne” remix as a masked Chinese President Xi Jinping and International Olympic Committee chief Thomas Bach looked on, this was primarily box checking predicament hopelessly in search of an effective exit strategy.As the fallout from doping scandals continue and a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine looms, the icy two-hour affair from China’s capitol simply pretended that diplomatic boycotts and other criticism of the Middle Kingdom’s alleged genocide against the Uyghur population and other mostly-Muslim ethnic groups never