What if the Olympics really shaped a nation? The Times has maps, covering the modern Olympic era, of how it would look if each country had a size that matched its medal count. The ones for the most recent Summer Games are recognizable, at least if you’ve seen maps based on GDP—the southern hemisphere is shrunken. (That may change after the Rio Olympics.) But at least it’s there, which is not true of the Winter Games’. Those look, at first, like maps of Pangaea, or like something a medieval monk would have drawn—just one big Europe, plus a lopsided island in the western seas. Then North America comes into its own, and Asia surfaces and disappears like a whale for a few decades before establishing itself firmly at Albertville in 1992. There are regular sightings of Australia, but South America and Africa have yet to emerge.
History and sports, or sports coverage, don’t always move in concert. NBC punctuated its video introducing Yevgeny Plushenko, the Russian figure-skater, with the iconography and symbols of the Soviet Union—Lenin statue, hammer and sickle—a country that ceased to exist when Plushenko was nine. (Incidentally, Close Read is still trying to figure out why someone was waving the old East German flag at the luge run on Sunday. That one wasn’t NBC’s fault; it may say something about the endurance of compromised sports bureaucracies, though.) Then again, Plushenko played a certain part. Speaking in somewhat unhinged terms about shadowy “enemies” who feared him (“you need all the time fighting, fighting with your enemies”), he sounded just like Dick Cheney, except fitter and more bespangled, with longer, blonder hair. (Or does that describe Liz Cheney?) Plushenko may be the only person who can make the sentence “I would like to be two-times Olympic champion—like Dick Button” sound like a line for the villain in a bad spy movie. But, unlike Cheney or a bad spy, he’s harmless, and it is very fun to watch him skate. We’ll see how he deals with his enemies—and what Johnny Weir has to wear—when they perform their long programs tonight.
And The New Yorker’s Nick Paumgarten is in Vancouver with all of them—he hasn’t encountered Dick Button yet, but he did run into Queen Latifah and a Swiss mob. His dispatches from the Games are at The Sporting Scene blog.