BEIJING — Kaishu Hirano of Japan is 19. He competed here in snowboarding, in the halfpipe. He did not win. His brother, Ayumu, did. No matter. Kaishu flew.
One of the basic tricks in snowboarding is called a method air. In this case, a backside air. You grab the heel edge of the board with your hand and pull the board up, arching your back. If all goes well, until gravity does its thing, for just an instant you are emblematic of human possibility there in the air, silhouetted against a clear blue sky, elegant, graceful, flying, literally flying. The American Ross Powers did this on his winning run in the pipe in Salt Lake City in 2002. Now, Kaishu Hirano.
Kaishu Hirano soaring over the halfpipe // Getty Images
The difference is that Kaishu Hirano flew way higher. From the bottom of the pipe to where he was up there was more than 46 feet. Above the lip of the pipe: 24 feet, four inches.
When the first drafts of the record of these 2022 Beijing Winter Games are written, there likely will be many references to Kamila Valieva, the 15-year-old Russian figure skater, and other controversies. Those are very real. The Games can sometimes spotlight some of the most challenging issues confronting our fragile and broken world.
But what about the achievement — the striving, the joy — of Kaishu Hirano and roughly 3,000 athletes from around the world?
The Beijing Games drew Sunday night to a close. They opened amid a worldwide pandemic that has shown little sign of ending; after three weeks inside the so-called “closed loop,” the International Olympic Committee said, the covid rate for those inside the bubble was effectively zero, probably the safest place — at least from the virus — on the planet. The Games opened amid great emphasis in the western press over the tennis player Peng Shuai; at Friday’s closing press conference with the International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach, not one question about her. The Games opened amid heated concern over China’s policies internally in its far west, and again with Taiwan, and also with the United States and others, the Americans declaring a “diplomatic boycott” of these Olympics. These matters drew all of one tangential question at Friday’s session, and this though Bach stayed an extra 15 minutes beyond his scheduled time with the media.
Of course, the Olympic movement, which wraps the world, comes layered with political character. Bach, in a 2014 speech in Korea, made plain that sports and politics obviously intersect. But any edition of the Games, and depending on how you view it, even or especially one in China, is not going to solve the world’s many geopolitically related issues. That’s not the mission or the mantra of an Olympics. With the world coming to Los Angeles in 2028, is the IOC now expected in the next six years to solve the city’s homelessness problem? As Bach has said, the IOC is not a “supra-world government.”
Indeed, amid the many controversies, and in particular the swirl around the postponement of Tokyo and the rush within just six months after to get to Beijing, Bach has been quite clear about what are the central objectives of his presidency, which began in 2013 and will end in 2025 — bringing the IOC into the 21st century, and making plain that, above all, the Games are for the athletes.
This is a key repositioning — indeed, re-anchoring — of the Games in our world.
They are for the athletes, first and foremost.
This — this — is the central story of Tokyo and, now, Beijing.
As the British writer and Olympic historian David Miller wrote before the Games in a brilliant essay for Rich Perelman’s outstanding website, The Sports Examiner, “It is Thomas Bach’s conviction that the Olympics are staged, essentially, for the pride and fulfillment of athletes rather than the engagement of fascinated spectators.”
This latter aim can clearly be traced to Bach’s own experience. An Olympic champion in 1976 in fencing, he was denied the chance to compete in Moscow in 1980 because of the U.S.-led boycott. With this in mind, he has sought these past two years to give every qualified athlete from anywhere her or his chance to realize her or his Olympic dream.
As Bach said in opening that closing Friday news conference, “We are coming to the close of what can be considered a very successful Olympic Winter Games. To measure this success, there are mainly two criteria, which depend on each other.”
One, the athletes: “Here in Beijing,” he said, “it is very obvious that the athletes are happy and are more than happy.”
Two, the venues and the Olympic village.
“The athletes have responded with outstanding performances and with, from my point of view, an unprecedented Olympic spirit. The intensity of this Olympic spirit was above and beyond what I have experienced before in Olympic Games.”
The Beijing Olympics mark the end of a three-Games Asian swing and, moreover, in a turn no one could have foreseen at the beginning of 2020, two Olympics in six months, Summer and Winter, both playing out under the pandemic.
The triple: PyeongChang 2018, Tokyo 2020, Beijing 2022.
That series underscored the emerging import, and clout, financial, political and more, of Asia in the Olympic movement — the Asian Games, little noticed in the United States and the west, the next edition set for September 2022 in Hangzhou, China, a behemoth with 482 events, 40 sports and roughly 11,000 athletes, are due to be opened, just like these Winter Games were, by China’s president Xi Jinping.
Few countries in the world could have pulled off a postponed Summer Games. Japan could, and did.
Beijing is now the first host in modern Olympic history to have staged both Summer (2008) and Winter (2022) Games.
An Olympic Games is the most complex mega-event on Planet Earth. Any edition is necessarily imperfect. Any fundamentally fair review of Beijing 2022 must begin and end, just as with Tokyo 2020, with this question, did they happen?
South Africa reported the omicron variant Nov. 24. American officials would later say that it was already in San Francisco on Nov. 22. The first week of February, with omicron accounting for almost 100% of covid cases, the seven-day average of daily covid-related deaths in the United States hit 2,600, the highest rate in about a year, higher than the roughly 2,000 daily deaths last fall during the Delta surge but fewer than the 3,000 daily deaths last January, when vaccines were not widely available.
The first week of February is the week the Beijing Games opened.
“From the pandemic,” Bach said Friday, “we have learned how fragile our life is. There is no difference to the Olympic movement. The pandemic has threatened our lives and has also threatened the life of the Olympic movement. It put two Games at high risk. We learned in the Olympic movement if we are united, we can be extremely resilient.”
Next fundamentally fair question about these Games — did the fencing, the hazmat suits, the throat swabs turn these Games sterile?
To believe the overriding narrative in the western press was to be fed a repetitive dose of a slog through an endless gray of grim. The Washington Post in a story posted Friday declared in a headline, “The closed loop eliminated covid, and joy, from the Olympics,” with examples of a sort that didn’t hold up (Belgian skeleton rider: “I don’t think I need an apology …. it was just a lot of bad luck along the road”) that built to this unattributed line from the story, “It cast a pall of pervasive joylessness,” followed by, again, unattributed, “Most athletes shared the same sentiment about their Beijing experiences.”
Except even the Post couldn’t get the no-joy story straight. Same newspaper, reporting from an event that very same Friday night: “Pairs figure skating brings a curious emotion to Beijing: jubilation.”
From the story, “the night brimmed with good vibes,” now referring to several of the skating teams: “All those people looked either happy or more so, with [one American team] achieving radiance.” One Chinese skater said of a Russian team: “I think it’s a wonderful thing to compete with each other, and we are improving because of each other.”
Instead of narrative, it would have been such a simple thing to ask the overwhelming majority of the 3,000 athletes how they felt about being here — the gift of a lifetime for most of them, the one chance at a Games.
From big air, Norway’s gold medalist Birk Ruud: “We are friends, we are competitors, but we are there for the sport and to have fun.” A moment or two later: “This is crazy. I am very, very happy. I am proud and a little emotional. It’s really great.”
Mike Fontaine of Canada did not medal in aerials. He finished 13th. “Finishing at the bottom doesn’t bother me at all,” he said. “All that concerned me was giving my all, giving my 100% and that’s what I did.”
At that aerials final, the bronze medalist, the ROC’s Ilia Burov, and the silver medalist, Ukraine’s Oleksandr Abramenko, embraced.
Sunday night’s closing ceremony // Getty Images
In closing the Games Sunday night at the Birds’ Nest, the IOC president said, addressing the athletes, who per tradition had walked in together, not separated by nation as is the case at the opening ceremony, on this evening to Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy,’: “You not only respected each other. You supported each other. You embraced each other, even if your countries are divided by conflict.”
At women’s big air, the American-born Elaine Gu, skiing for China, who had just won gold, along with Switzerland’s Mathilde Gremaud, the bronze winner, rushed to console Tess Ledeux of France, the silver medalist, knowing that Ledeux had so wanted to win in part to honor of her father, who had died the year before. “I won because of them,” Gu would say later. “They have made the skier I am.”
The American-born Japanese ice dancer Tim Koleto said after the rhythm dance with his wife Misato Komatsubara, “Figure skating is a sport that’s not just about skill, but it’s also about performance. And a lot of what we talked about in our practice and before performances, before we take our starting position, is we don’t know what’s going to happen with the scores or our placements. Or even with tomorrow — if all the competitions disappear again. We’ve all been through that recently in the last two or three years,” because of the pandemic.
“So,” he said, “I’m very happy to hear that some of our joy on the ice was able to be shared with everyone else.”
At the very cold biathlon course Friday, this from Norway’s Vetle Sjaastad Christiansen Friday at the 15km mass start: “My face was hurtling like hell but I was also happy like hell.”
So not grim.
Of course, of course, of course there were problems and challenges here at the 2022 Winter Olympics. Life is real. The best of the Olympics is about trying to reach an ideal.
“If sport can play a role in society,” Bach said a year ago, “it lies in strengthening cooperation between neighbors, giving everyone, especially the young, hope for a better future.”
Imagine being 46 feet off the ground, soaring in the air. What that must feel like. Just that one — perfect moment.
“I’ve always had big air as the thing to do on this stage,” Kaishu Hirano, 19 years old, said. “Doing one that lives long in people’s memories — rather than in record books.”