Olympic Glory
It's within our grasp
I didn’t watch all of the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony. Which is probably a good thing, because I fear my head may have exploded. Which, from what I did see and have since seen, may have been the desired intent. I certainly saw enough to know it was exactly like the French unit’s contribution to every Richmond Road Primary School production I attended when my kids were at primary school. If the French unit had a budget of millions upon millions of dollars, that is.
To give that a context that the many many people outside of the Richmond Road community might understand, Auckland’s Richmond Road Primary School has four different “nests” including L'Archipel, which is a French bilingual unit, mainly for the kids of French-speaking families in Auckalofa. And every year, come school production time, L'Archipel would take whatever the theme was that year and they would can-can off into the distance with it and come back with some long, tangential take on things, which would leave all the non-French parents deeply confused.
Viva la France, I say.
Now. From a distance. When I don’t have to sit through it any more.
In other words, I loved the fact that the lateral thinking that seems engrained in the French was given a global stage (as opposed to the stage at Ponsonby Intermediate) on which to inflict itself on the world. It turned an event that has become a predictable, yet often impressive, display of national hubris into a warts-and-all romp through a country’s history. Singing headless Marie Antoinettes! Gojira hanging off the side of the Conciergerie! Dionysus and haute couture and parkour and weird shit in the pouring rain!
I loved the parade of boats down the Seine. It was infinitely more interesting than marching everyone into a stadium and then having the athletes standing there looking bored during the boring speeches. I did wonder, however, if there was some kind of underlying message at play in that some nations at severe risk of climate change, like the Marshall and Cayman Islands, were relegated to tiny boats that looked like lifeboats, while the major polluting nations steamed past in small ocean-liners.
Also I really wanted the Olympic flame to end up in the courtyard outside the Centre Pompidou, where a mime with an unlit cigarette was in an invisible glass box. The Olympic torch would light the Olympic cigarette and for the duration of the games the mime would sit in the invisible glass box and mime-smoke the cigarette and drink mime Pastis, whilst ignoring and disdaining all the tourists taking photographs of him. Then, at the end of the games, the mime would stub out the cigarette and go home to wherever all the mimes in France live.
An opportunity missed, I felt, when instead they decided to do some kind of Hindenburg-style thing, by setting fire to a hot-air balloon.
Watching the opening ceremony of Paris 2024, whilst doing my head in, did kind of inspire me as to what New Zealand could do, at some stage in a dystopian future, should we ever decide to bankrupt the country by bringing the Olympics to Auckland.
Obviously the Olympic flame, which would look like a fence-post on fire, would have to travel the length of the nation, from Rakiura north. Hopefully there won’t be too many regions with a complete fire ban in place at the time, that it would have to skirt.
On the day of the opening ceremony the flame would start its journey in Hamilton. There, at dawn, with due ceremony, to celebrate the Tradies of this country, the torch would be mounted on the back of a black Ford Ranger – along with some symbolic #8 wire and a bunch of other stuff we needed to get to Auckland on the day, probably to finish the renovations on Eden Park.
The Ford Ranger bearing the Olympic Flame would then gun it along the Waikato Expressway at 130k’s (the traditional land-speed of the Ranger). It would make a mighty sight as it crested the Bombay Hills and then overtook a phalanx of camper vans coming down the other side.
Then, at about Takanini, the Ranger would hit a traffic jam symbolizing Auckland’s shit traffic. From there it would crawl very slowly towards Auckland, seemingly randomly changing lanes in an intricate dance with all the other vehicles seemingly randomly changing lanes, trying in vain to find a faster lane.
Meanwhile the TV coverage would be cutting away to stuff that defines Kiwi culture, like Six60 hanging off the Sky Tower on bungy cords, playing “Don’t Forget Your Roots”.
Originally the idea for the opening ceremony of Auckland When-the-fuck-ever, was that the Olympic torch would reach Rocket Lab’s HQ in Mount Wellington. From there a small, torch-bearing rocket would be launched, aimed at the actual Maungarei (Mount Wellington). This would set off an incredible laser show and, in turn, send another rocket off in the direction of Puketāpapa (Mount Roskill), where another spectacular laser show would light up the sky and another rocket would be launched in the direction of Maungawhau (Mt.Eden)….
And so on and so forth until all the maunga of Tāmaki Makaurau are ablaze in lasers and corporate logos.
Unfortunately this idea will, inevitably, be quashed on two fronts as: (a) Worksafe will put the kibosh on firing rockets at maunga in a heavily populated area; and (b) the consultation process for allowing the maunga of Tāmaki Makaurau to be used as missile targets, laser sites and corporate billboards, despite having gone on for six years, will still be nowhere near complete.
The fallback option, then, is that every household in Auckland is given enough fireworks to light up the night sky in a spectacular show that symbolizes New Zealand’s love of doing crazy shit with fireworks.
Unfortunately, on the night, all this will do is cover the entire city in a blanket of gunpowder fog when everyone sets their fireworks off all at once. Parts of West Auckland may, indeed, burn to the ground. But that is the price you must pay for a great Olympic opening ceremony.
Meanwhile, the Olympic torch has been transferred from the Ford Ranger – now hopelessly stuck in traffic at Tip-Top Corner – to some boy racers, who do doughnuts with it on Go Media Stadium at half-time in the middle of a Warriors game, which the Warriors go on lose to narrowly miss out on the playoffs, due to them tripping up on the parts of the pitch ripped up by the dough-nutting.
After a police chase down the South-Western motorway, the boy racers are tasered near Lincoln Road and at gunpoint give the torch to some self-entitled middle-aged men in lycra, who cycle furiously with it, towards the city, along the Northwestern Cycleway, barking at the flag-waving children in their path to get out of the way.
When the lycra men stop for coffee and righteous indignation about the car-driving troglodytes in this city, at a café in Ponsonby, the torch is uplifted and taken for a walk down K Road by some drag queens before being handed off to Taika Waititi. Taika has no idea why he’s been handed the torch, but he was heading down Queen Street anyway, so he takes it that way.
Somehow – and no-one will ever be entirely clear how (least of all Taika) – Taika and the torch end up at the Viaduct, where he is told to hand it over as he heads into Soul Bar & Bistro for dinner. Whatever, says Taika.
From there the Olympic torch embarks on the penultimate leg of its journey – by Fullers ferry to Rangitoto Island.
Several hours later, after much rescheduling, a Fullers ferry takes the Olympic torch to Rangitoto Island.
There, a bunch of apparent celebrities from reality TV and breakfast radio, who no-one in New Zealand actually knows who they are, runs/walks/selfies a torch relay to the summit of Rangitoto.
There, at dawn because we are many hours behind schedule, the great New Zealander AJ Hackett bungy jumps with the Olympic torch into the crater of Rangitoto, which has been filled with kerosene.
To be honest, the less said about the actual lighting of the Olympic flame at Auckland When-for-fucking-ever the better. Some ideas work better as ideas than in their execution.
On the upside, the whole bungy jumping thing does remind everyone that Six60 are still dangling from the Sky Tower, bobbing up and down.
Then the actual games start and New Zealand wins no medals but finishes 4th a lot of the time.
And then the bill for the Olympics comes in and we officially join the 3rd world.
Except, because we are New Zealand, we join the 4th world.