The countdown can be measured in hours and minutes and last-minute details now. The athletes are pumped up. The Secret Service snipers and the National Guardsmen in their camouflage gear are at their posts.
It's been 2,428 days since that euphoric June afternoon when 50,000 people, standing shoulder to shoulder in Washington Square, heard the news that "the city of Salt Lake City" had been awarded the 2002 Winter Games. The crowd let out a roar that could be heard blocks away, and a band played "Fun, Fun, Fun."
Like any old snapshot, that one captures a moment that seems so heartachingly uncomplicated now: a time when the city and the nation had never heard the words "bid scandal" or "homeland security" and could not imagine what "9-11" would come to mean.
Nearly seven years older and wiser now, some 80 nations come together tonight to begin 17 days of competition and togetherness — and countless TV moments designed to make us feel inspired, elated and weepy.
The "healing Olympics," Olympic organizers have been calling the Games, a nod to both the shared trauma of Sept. 11 and the potential of the Games to act as a catharsis for a nation whose sense of itself has been altered.
That's a tall order for a sporting event, even one that, as sardonic media critic Bob Garfield puts it, "is a quadrennial serotonin producer."
Will the 2002 Winter Games change us as a nation and a world? Is "healing Olympics" just another marketing device, an attempt to draw a bigger audience and steer the media away from previous labels and concerns (the "Mormon Olympics," the bid scandal case now heading toward an appeal by prosecutors of the charges' dismissal, and the possibility that the Games could be a bull's eye for terrorist activity)? Is it presumptuous to think that a sporting event, even one that is watched by 3.2 billion people, can be a salve to a nation wounded by attack, anthrax, war, recession and Enron?
"In our more cynical moments," says sports historian Jeffrey Segrave, "we can say that the rhetoric serves the Olympic organizers and corporate interests really well." But there is also some truth to the notion of these Olympics as healing, says Segrave, chairman of the department of exercise science, dance and athletics at Skidmore College.
The public, over the past decade, has become more cynical about the Games. And for good reason, says Segrave, pointing to bid scandals and drug scandals and rampant commercialism. "But the post 9-11 zeitgeist is that the public in general has become more sensitive to the ideology of the Games," to their transcendent notions of peaceful competition and brotherhood.
"At this time in our history, we all thirst for some sort of global celebration," something that holds our collective attention but isn't about terrorism. "A celebration of something more deeply human."
The irony, notes Segrave, is that "one of the most celebrated peace movements on the planet will look like a prisoner of war camp." And all it will take is "one terrorist twitch," he adds, to make us feel nervous and depressed all over again.
Although he expects nothing like that to happen over the next 17 days, he says he can't help but notice that while the Summer Games are truly diverse, the winter ones mostly feature white faces. "If someone wanted to make a statement against the westernization of the world," he says, the Winter Games would be the place to do it.
In general, says Mike Moran, managing director of media relations for the USOC, expectations for the Olympics are always too great. "They're characterized as opportunities to change society, cure social ills or political situations. It's almost impossible for a sporting event, even one with an accompanying ideal, to do that."
On the other hand, he remembers the outpouring of emotion after the 1980 Olympics when the USOC received 150,000 pieces of mail in two weeks. "They talked about how proud (the U.S. hockey victory) made them feel. It gave them something to feel good about."
Two decades later, "what needs to be healed in this country is massive," Moran says. "The Olympics can't do that, but it can make individuals all over the world feel good." He echoes the caution expressed by other observers who hope that Olympics ceremonies will not be about U.S. patriotism.
Certainly some of us still need healing in a very real sense.
Dave Tomb and his colleagues in the psychiatric community see those people all the time now: people who were affected by Sept. 11 in a vague but troubling way, whose anxiety and depression have escalated even though they know no one personally who worked in the World Trade Center or was on a hijacked plane.
People affected by trauma, even trauma at a distance, actually experience anatomical changes to their brains, says Tomb, professor of psychiatry at the University of Utah and author of books on post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety. Those changes can be measured by brain imaging machines — and after a period of successful therapy, says Tomb, those brain changes actually disappear.
Literally and metaphorically, could the Olympics help repair an injured psyche, or even a nation of injured psyches?
Tomb laughs before he answers. "Heaven only knows," he says. "I suppose you could argue that it could; if there is a general sense of the world pulling together; if, when the Olympics finally grind down, we're left with a general sense that the world is OK after all, that there are a few bad actors but basically we're all pulling together, that there is brotherhood to be had on all fronts."
Healing takes time, he adds. But if the Olympics go well, "you might over time see a reversal of things as concrete as the way brains function on our most scientific measurements."
Alexis Kelner, long a foe of Salt Lake's hosting of the Olympics, has a different take on it all. The only good part about the Olympics will be when they're over, he says. True healing, he says, would mean reversing the land swap between Snowbasin and the U.S. Forest Service that allowed the ski resort to expand in time for the Games.
Media critic Bob Garfield of National Public Radio's "On the Media" rolls his eyes when he hears the words "healing Olympics." In an environment "so tainted with scandal and commercialism," it's a far-fetched idea, he says. "Still, people get caught up in the emotions of the Games, however manipulated by the (TV) networks." As for himself, "I make sure to have plenty of insulin available."
In the Olympics as translated by NBC, he says, "everybody is a hero. Nobody is just a good athlete or hard working. They've all lifted themselves from tragic circumstances. People buy into this myth and the myth becomes reality."
But heroes are what we want these days. And, even without the "up close and personal" vignettes, the Games are sure to give us exhilarating moments of grace, or at least gracefulness, under pressure. There are sure to be close finishes and close calls, maybe even victory for an underdog.
We want to feel uplifted. We want to feel emotion — not about loss of life but about something as simple as losing a race. We want the world to get along. We want, when it's all over, for Salt Lake City to still be standing. And, so, the Games begin.
E-MAIL: jarvik@desnews.com