Michael Moynihan: A chill at wintry Olympic Games

Jack Gower of Team Ireland skies during the Men's Downhill 1st training session ahead of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games at National Alpine Ski Centre. Picture: Tom Pennington/Getty Images

Thoughts and prayers with Sjoerd den Daas this morning.

If you’re not keeping up with the news, Sjoerd is the Dutch TV reporter who was live on camera last week giving a report from the Winter Olympics in China when things took a turn. He was approached by a security guard who grabbed, pushed, and yelled at him, eventually dragging him out of camerashot.

The Dutch network eventually cut away from the shot and went back to a nonplussed programme host in the studio.

There’s so much to this incident you could fill a supplement with it, not least the neat detail that the security guard in question had a red armband, rather than the hi-vis yellow vests favoured in these parts.

There’s the fact that these Games are on in China in the first place, a kind of physical manifestation of the moral vacuum that is modern sport. That the International Olympic Committee should find a bedfellow in the Chinese regime is no more a surprise than the breezy downplaying of the incident we heard afterwards from the IOC.

"Obviously we have been in touch with the NOS, the state broadcaster, and it was an unfortunate circumstance," spokesperson Mark Adams said. ”I think someone was being overzealous. (The reporter) was able to, very quickly afterwards with the help of officials there, do his piece to camera.

“These things do happen and I think it's a one-off. I hope it's a one-off and we will assure you that within the closed loop you will be able to carry on your work.”

If you think that moral vacuum is an exaggeration, don’t let Adams’ reference to a closed loop pass you by.

This is the term used for the anti-virus bubble in operation for the Games in China, with all participants, media and support staff staying within a strictly defined zone for the duration of the event. It’s intended to cut down transmission of covid-19, though inevitably there have already been cases within the loop.

In remaining within that loop, of course, it means inquisitive journalists from all over the world are also kept away from the general population in China. People who might not be as quick as Mark Adams to describe incidents of censorship as overzealous or a one-off. Or who might have more forthright views on issues like the treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang in China, for instance.

If you feel that’s a harsh view, consider the opinion of Professor John J MacAloon of the University of Chicago, who’s written several books on the Olympic Games: “If the IOC simply ignores what’s happening in Xinjiang, then for many people, while it does its duty in providing a Games for the athletes, the IOC is effectively resigning from leadership of the Olympic movement, a social movement enshrining common humanity, human dignity, and human rights.”

MacAloon added that the Chinese government upped the ante in the second week of January, “when the deputy director of the organizing committee, a high CCP official, explicitly threatened the world’s athletes in Beijing, saying that if they act, protest or speak in a way that is offensive to Chinese law and the Chinese government, there will be ‘certain punishment’...

“Nothing like this has ever taken place before. It’s completely unprecedented in my 50 years of ethnography as an anthropologist of the Olympic Games, or in my historical research.”

You don’t need to have spent five decades studying the Olympic movement to know about its leaders’ ability to show the way in hypocrisy and double-dealing, but rarely has that hypocrisy been so openly exposed.

Magic on the wing and in the club

I noted in passing a reference somewhere online to a dinner held by Chelsea FC for their manager and players as a kind of thank-you for... something or other.

Normally this kind of information stuns me like the blow of a padded hammer, but I read that the dinner was the idea of club director Marina Granovskaia — snore — and was attended by various bigwigs in the club — again, snore — including David Redfearn, ‘Chelsea’s resident magician’.

Wait, what?

Of course I had to investigate further and found David’s website, which gives details of his rise (?) to that position.

“So, how did I become the resident magician at Chelsea (excluding Eden Hazard)? My story starts with a chance meeting with the legendary Glenn Hoddle in a restaurant in London back in 1992. He enjoyed my magic so much that he suggested I make contact with Carol Phair (Commercial Manager, CFC at the time).

“So, naturally I made the call and was delighted when Carol told me to come along on match days to see how the guests would react — 25 years later I am still invited along to entertain VIP clients in all areas of Stamford Bridge.”

In fairness to David, I think this kind of job should be a feature at all large clubs and sporting organisations. What every team and stadium needs is a resident magician (not Eden Hazard either, as noted, a reference which does date the segment somewhat).

Of course, even a magician would be stymied by the problems which present themselves at some of our great venues, but a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, eh?

Plastic makes perfect practice

Saturday night yours truly was in Páirc Uí Chaoimh for Cork and Clare — or Cork and Clare squared, seeing as there were two games on. I bailed out after the hurling game because I was beginning to lose feeling in my toes, but great to see a game with a crowd and so on.

A colleague remarked on the openness of the game —true — and wondered if that was why we see relatively few of the cracked knuckles and broken fingertips of the old days. It was an interesting point, particularly when you consider that players must practice at the same level when it does come to contact in training sessions.

What made sense to me was the pal who told me last week that one of the bigger hurling counties had recently ordered a hundred plastic hurleys for that kind of close-contact training: replicates the intensity but with less chance of a splintered thumb.

Thinking ahead.

Power to the people

I see Kevin Power has a new book of essays coming out soon, The Written World: Essays and Reviews.

Books of essays and reviews are my own weak spot, so long as the essays and reviews are about matters that I recognise, at least: nothing worse than ploughing your way through delicate analyses or raging polemics which presuppose a level of familiarity the reader can’t rise to.

Which is why the cast list of Power’s book is both reassuring and encouraging — Annie Proulx, Roisin Kiberd, Bill Clinton and James Patterson — as is a healthy tanning for Martin Amis and due tribute to all-time great Clive James.

Glad to see, too, that some of the writers James mentions in his great Cultural Amnesia were unfamiliar to other readers also. At times I thought James was having the last laugh by making some of them up entirely.

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