We laughed at Quebec at the time, when the national capital’s bid committee for the 2002 Winter Games was, it was said, studying the possibility of “jacking” a mountain of Stoneham a few hundred meters in order to be able to host alpine skiing competitions and board sports. The feat of the Chinese, almost as funny, is to have treated the snow as a simple accessory of the Winter Games. It has ceased to be decor to become decorum.
It’s understood, the climate is getting warmer and artificial snow is the future. And the three meters of natural snow that bury fir trees and spruce trees north of Quebec will never be anything but local color because, as we have long understood, money is the only thing that can be collected in spades. at the Olympic games.
Am I the only one to feel, in front of these Olympiads orchestrated by the healthiest (in the sense of disinfected) and ruthlessly secure political regime on the planet, something like a sweet disenchantment? I try to remember the exact moment when the flame of the Winter Games went out for me. It can’t be 2002, when I was screaming with happiness all alone in my living room at the four points scored in the final by Joe Sakic, a former Nordic, while we planted the Americans on their ice in Salt Lake City. Nor is it in Turin, of which I have fewer memories, nor obviously in Vancouver, where the Hamelin brothers, my cousins on the left buttock, were so fast on their skates.
No, it has to be Sochi, in 2014. Where Tsar Putin had himself built, at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains, the pharaonic winter sports resort in which the most expensive Olympic Games were to take place. history (since supplanted by those of Tokyo). And since we hadn’t spent 50 billion beautiful petrodollars from the Caspian Sea to foolishly get beaten by the Norwegians, the Russians took great measures to make their investment profitable. Overseen by the Muscovite State at the highest level, the institutionalized doping system which was then set up by the host country of these Games is still astonishing today.
Even if, in terms of the use of prohibited substances, the worst naive people lost their last illusions a long time ago, the revelations of a member of the Russian sports hierarchy who defected to the United States and describing the missions of the special agents who entered Breaking into laboratories to steal test tubes and falsify samples still chilled the blood.
Twenty years after Lillehammer, this small Norwegian town less populated than Sept-Îles whose Games held in a true northern climate had reached heights of simplicity and human warmth, Sotchi, at the other end of the spectrum, looked like a perfectly assumed Olympic glory with its organized cheating and its potentate draped in bloated patriotism.
However, less than four years after becoming pariahs of the world sports scene, the Russian Olympic athletes were already back, competing in South Korea under a flag of convenience, as they say in the navy. This soap opera still lacked the spectacular Olympic rehabilitation of the indestructible autocrat on the grandstand of the Beijing stadium, the Putin ready to eat Ukraine who posed on the front page of my newspaper the other morning, arm of iron in a silk glove from Xi’an, buddy as a pig with the good Xi Jinping, this great follower of transparency who would never tolerate a system of occult doping covered by the political authority in his court, is not it not? Moreover, the fourth position of the People’s Republic of China in the medal table of the Beijing Games should almost reassure us…
But the absurd Valieva affair, named after this 15-year-old Russian figure skater who tested positive for a banned substance, but was still authorized to perform, although deprived of a medal in advance, shows that the legacy of the Olympism is poisoned, that state machines continue to machine flesh on the podium and that the abscess is far from having been emptied in Sochi.
There remain, fortunately, the athletes… Especially those who do not allow themselves to be completely formatted by an obsession with performance, which sometimes itself borders on ideology and which seems just as harmful as political calculations. Fortunately, there is the biathlete Jules Burnotte to declare in an interview: “I never really liked training to shoot. Maybe if he happens to miss the target on the beautiful artificial snow of a Beijing suburb, that one won’t burst into tears as if his world was falling apart and he had no still a whole life ahead of him?
Yes, fortunately there are the athletes. Fortunately, there was Gaétan in Sarajevo, Myriam in Lillehammer, Marc, Jamie and David on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, and Charles in Turin, Vancouver, Sochi, Pyeongchang, Beijing… This distant cousin on my father’s side who is now Canada’s most decorated male athlete in Winter Games history. Plans to reconcile me with the Olympic ideal.