A view of the Duomo gothic cathedral on a sunny day last week during the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics.Luca Bruno/The Associated Press
The first few mornings in Milan, before getting my Olympic bearings, I would pass a group of youngish, local degenerates who had commandeered a couple of benches along my route. They’d sit there all day, hacking butts and sneaking beers. You’d see them coming and going.
The first time I walked by, all five or six heads swivelled in unison. They looked me up and down, trying to decide if I was worth rolling, while I fished around in my bag for my keys, hoping to put at least one of them in the hospital if they decided to go ahead with it.
After a couple of days, we had progressed to a nodding acquaintance. A day later, definable gestures of greeting. By the end, it was ‘Buongiorno’ and ‘Buona sera’ and even a couple of smiles.
As much as the sports, this is for me the soul of the Olympics – people who do not know each other, and may even be inclined to dislike each other, being thrust together and forced to act out friendship. In so doing, they may eventually arrive at something like the real thing.
What people want to know after every Olympics is, ‘What was it like?’
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They are all the same in one regard – it’s like being at the very centre of things. You can feel the world’s attentional gravitation being pulled in around you.
You schlep out to an industrial estate on the outskirts of a European capital. The arena either looks like they built it yesterday (which they did), or like they’ll be doing an auto show in it a week later.
The secondary hockey arena wasn’t an arena. It was a temporary soundstage planted in the midst of an enormous warehouse, which you got to by walking past a dozen other warehouses just like it.
When you get there four hours early, the effect is chilling. This is post-industrial blight. Then it fills up and the Olympics starts happening. And, for as long as it takes to complete, this is the happiest, most exciting place on the planet.
While Milan may be too cool of a city to be overly welcoming hosts, it warmed to the Games as they progressed.Maja Hitij/Getty Images
At that same arena, the in-show MC – a thwarted Italian game-show host – would sing Volare during breaks in play. Sometimes you’d catch a player standing on the ice, watching him in disbelief.
The crowd would sing along and they’d do a big finish together at the end. It was complete cheese, and at the same time, magic.
That magic is latent in every moment at an Olympics. Every small interaction could become an indelible memory, or an iconic fish tale. Your antenna is up, and you are constantly on the alert.
Sometimes you’ll be listening to an athlete who has just won or lost, and though they are standing, they have laid themselves down on a metaphoric couch. They’re pouring it all out, years of things they haven’t let themselves think about, never mind say aloud, to complete strangers. How afraid they were, or how hard it was, or how bewildering this all is. You are struck by what an immense privilege it is to see others at their happiest, or saddest, or most vulnerable.
You inevitably come away from an Olympics thinking, ‘I should tell people that I love them more often.’ It makes for great calls home.
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Coming back from the ice dancing one evening, after a 25-hour day, my Globe teammate Robyn Doolittle told a first-person story about Toronto Star legend Rosie DiManno so hilarious that I wept on the Milan Metro. Full, streaming tears.
It included a phrase that is now burned on my lizard brain – “maniacally kneeing him in the groin.” Rosie was standing beside us, only half-listening, but gently miming the kneeing.
It was late, and the Metro was jammed. I don’t know where all these people are going, but they are permanently going there. The Milanese packed in around us were appalled. Crying on the Metro? Save that for Sicily, pal. We have our pride and our mascara to worry about.
For a brief period of time, the Olympics bring our attention together in a way that few other things can.Luca Bruno/The Associated Press
What was Milan like? Gorgeous. Amazing. Terrible for an Olympics, but amazing.
There is an ideal city to host big, loud sports events, and it isn’t one that Leonardo da Vinci did his best work in. After that, nothing is going to impress these people.
I can’t speak for the mountains, which were too far away to access in an efficient way, but Milan was accommodating rather than welcoming. Were it not for the occasional piece of signage, or that eyesore of a shop erected in front of the Duomo, you would not have known an Olympics was happening.
If you want an Olympic host, it has to be a city that loves having people over (Vancouver), or is a bit of a show-off (London), or has nothing else going on (Sochi). Milan was too suave to be turned on by short-track speed skating.
I have known the word sprezzatura for a long time. I didn’t understand it until I spent a few weeks here. Most of these people would be as likely to go to a funeral in a clown costume than they would be to tolerate a hockey jersey in their homes.
That said, they did warm up as it went on. Upon arrival, the centre was a ghost town. You’d come back at night and think, ‘Nerve toxin?’
But by the second weekend of the Games, all those who had fled to the country returned, and the city began to pulse. Even these terminally cool cats were falling under the Olympic spell.
The first and only important goal of any Olympics is to get to the end. Milan came through.
I fear for the next couple of Games – L.A. will be a kitschy display of Americana, long past the point where anyone else is impressed by that; while the French Alps will be inaccessible to anyone save the super rich. The Olympics as live spectacle is entering a period of terminal decline, I suspect.
The most important thing is that it retain the capacity to make friends of people who aren’t all that interested in the idea, or are even resistant.
As long as that is possible, there will be a place for the Olympics, regardless of where they put it.