Will Olympic Games provide distraction?

Associated Press

RIO DE JANEIRO

Even if only for two weeks, can “Faster-Higher-Stronger” overpower deadlier, scarier and bloodier? Can the Olympic Games still offer the world momentary levity, distract from terror, shootings, poverty and other worries in globally grim times? If not, what use is the multibillion-dollar celebration of youthful endeavor and mostly niche sports?

Through no fault of their own, the athletes who will march in massed, joyful ranks behind their nations’ flags in tonight’s opening ceremony for the first Olympic Games in South America shoulder expectations beyond their own ambitions for gold, silver, bronze and personal bests.

No Olympics in recent memory has opened under so many dark clouds, both within recession-battered Brazil and beyond. Headliners Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps are back for more medals. But no feat of theirs, or the other 10,500 Olympians, between the first medal awards Saturday and the Aug. 21 closing ceremony will paste over recent horrors of 84 people murdered with a truck in Nice or the shooting massacre of 49 people in a Florida nightclub. Sports are, and always will be, trivial compared with such atrocities that have come depressingly thick and fast of late.

“The Olympics may help me take my mind off things,” said Parisian lawyer Remy Durand, reflecting over lunch Thursday on the Champs-Elysees. “But it’s not going to change my overall mood lastingly, after the attacks in recent weeks and months in France.”

Yet Olympic organizers can’t be faulted for trying, with their “Together we can change the world” slogan and #OlympicPeace hashtag. Cold War boycotts aside, the games remain a symbol of global togetherness, even if an increasingly commercialized one. By putting religion and politics aside, the Olympics still can remind the world’s people of their shared humanity, not their divisions.

Picture Berlin in 1936, when white German long jumper Luz Long bonded with black American Jesse Owens when Adolf Hitler wanted to peddle racial supremacy. Or Sydney in 2000, when athletes from North and South Korea walked together behind one flag in the opening ceremony, momentarily putting aside more than half a century of enmity. Or Barcelona in 1992, when white South African Elana Meyer ran over to plant a kiss on Ethiopia’s Derartu Tulu. Meyer had won silver to Tulu’s gold in the 10,000 meters to become her country’s first post-apartheid individual medalist.

At the opening gala of these Olympics at Rio’s Maracana Stadium tonight, 10 refugee athletes will march as one team behind the white Olympic flag – a reminder to the world that they aren’t solely defined by their lack of a place to call home. While not as grand as opening ceremonies past, Rio still expects to wow.

“The Athens ceremony was classic, and Beijing was grand, was musical. London was quite smart. We’re going to be cool,” said creative director Fernando Meirelles.