On Sunday an Olympic spokesperson actually put out a statement explaining that the Games’ flame in the Bird’s Nest stadium hadn’t gone out. “The flame is fine,” they said when approached by USA Today, whose photographer Rob Schumacher published a shot that suggested it was very much not. Somewhere else in the Olympic village, irony keeled over and died.
I’ve had one eye on the vaguely dystopian spectacle of these Games, a hyperreal propaganda-spectacular played out, in part, on phoney snow and against the backdrop of an abandoned steel mill. The other has been reading about what IOC president Thomas Bach calls the “boycott ghosts of the past”, and in particular the story of Rudi Ball.
