A Very Retro Olympics Opening Ceremony

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.

This year’s ceremony, by contrast, opened with a pair of dancers in angel wings reenacting the neoclassical sculpture Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, which was created about 100 years before the invention of the lightbulb. The show then ran through a psychedelic tribute to a bygone Italy, a sort of live highlight reel of hundreds of years of civilization, rendered bonkersly but quaintly: Color-saturated Roman centurions marched solemnly in line with people dressed as moka pots; visual gags celebrated pasta, paparazzi, the film La Dolce Vita. At one point, the great composers Verdi, Puccini, and Rossini appeared in bobblehead proportions, like the guys who run the bases at Minor League baseball games: history turned into a cartoon, very literally.

At nearly every moment, the reference point was somewhere from decades to millennia in the past. The violinist Giovanni Andrea Zanon played a 300-year-old Stradivarius; a phalanx of models strutted around in classic suits in the colors of the Italian flag; the actress Sabrina Impacciatore paid tribute to the Olympics’ more recent past via an extended dance sequence set in the 1970s and ’80s. Even Mariah Carey, the show’s major modern performer, was dressed like an Old Hollywood starlet in a sparkly dress and a voluminous ostrich-feather stole; she sang an exceptionally breathy version of “Nel blu, dipinto di blu,” which came out in 1958.

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Maybe all of this is to be expected for a country whose best-known cultural influences lived during the Renaissance. But the production itself was also undeniably retro: The lights were minimal, the music mostly classical, the choreography traditional. With a few exceptions, the entire show could have been produced anytime in the past 40 years.

Before the opening ceremony, people gathered in the streets to protest the governments of various countries competing, as well as the festivities’ very existence amid a major affordability crisis in Milan. During the Games, organizers will be using 3 million cubic yards of artificial snow: In Northern Italy, as in all over the world, the sky can no longer be reliably expected to behave like it used to. The 2028 Summer Games, to be held in Los Angeles, are already beset by concerns about cost overruns. The Olympics are one of our oldest global institutions, which is another way of saying they are a bit archaic—of, and invented in, a different world. The future is uncertain; best to focus on the past.