The performance in Milan looked squarely at the past, both in substance and in style.
Every Olympics opening ceremony is an advertisement—for the host country, for the Olympics themselves, for the notion of a free-trading global order competing through sport, in the same place and on even ground. This year, the ceremony for the Winter Olympics, held in the Italian cities Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, was also an advertisement for the past.
This focus on the old is, well, new. Although every ceremony is, to some degree, a celebration of the host country’s history, the event has recently tended to feel like a technology-conference keynote, or a music festival. Two years ago, in Paris, organizers turned the seventh arrondissement into a light show and devoted considerable airtime to the Minions. Beijing’s event, in 2022, looked uncannily like a laptop screensaver. The year prior, at the opening for the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Games, the mood was painfully contemporary, with a minimalist soundtrack and drones flying overhead. Everyone wants to reinvent the wheel, and the Olympics are a chance to show off on the world’s biggest stage. Usually, it seems, this is accomplished via lots and lots of LEDs.
