Post No Berlin (or L.A.)

Friday's opening of the Olympic Games in London certainly gave the world an, er, English spin on the occasion. Those quirky Brits, offering the short course on the Industrial Revolution and a half-century of pop music; a paean to socialized medicine with dancing doctors and Busby Berkeley bed-rolling; and, in a cultural high point, Mr Bean.

BBC commentators fell all over themselves in praising the festivities, while NBC's crew seemed awestruck enough to forget their background notes. (Just who was that Tim Berners-Lee guy, anyway?) Ceremony supremo Danny Boyle, it seemed, got the whole thing right.

Except that he didn't. When It came time to note past Olympiads, a few went missing. And we're not talking the Intercalated Games, either.

Roll back to the very start of the presentation, with the short film entiled The Isles of Wonder. Go ahead and click on the link, sit through the commercial for a tiresome Universal movie, and then fast-forward to 2:22. Posters from previous games will pop up on the screen -- and the omissions begin.

The first miss comes with the second Olympiad in 1900. In fairness, the games in Paris played second-fiddle to a concurrent international exhibition, and didn't rate a number of fancy posters; The idea of an official poster for each Olympiad started a dozen years later in Stockholm.) However, there's a generally accepted image, seen at left.

Paris gets its due with a poster from the 1924 games, immortalized by the best film made with a reference to the Olympics, Chariots of Fire. (The second-best is, arguably, Children of Glory, written by Joe Esterhas and virtually unseen in the United States.) The next Olympiad to get Boyle's cold shoulder, however, is a bit hard to miss.

It's also easy to catch. As the posters go by, you see 1928 Amsterdam, 1932 Los Angeles, 1948 London ....

Whoa there. The memory train rolls right by 1936 and the Berlin Olympiad, possibly the most-famous games held. The event certainly carries the identification with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, but it also gave the Olympics an identity it carries to this day, inaugurating traditions such as pageantry at the opening ceremonies and the torch relay.

There's also the performances of Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe to debunk the whole master-race argument in front of the fascists. The poster isn't bearing a swastika, so what's the problem here?

So, the film continues, and the games move into the era of worldwide television, with 1968 Mexico City, 1972 Munich, 1976 Montreal, 1980 Moscow, 1988 Seoul ....

Hey, hey, hey. Now we're skipping the games that brought the Olympics back from the abyss: 1984 Los Angeles, taken on when nobody wanted the event. It survived the Soviet-bloc boycott and showed how the Olympics could be run efficiently and debt-free.

We even pulled in one of the great American artists, Robert Rauchenberg, to do the official poster. Maybe Boyle didn't like the horizontal orientation.

I know this won't blow up into a big controversy, although the latter two omissions seem like pointed snubs. It also doesn't fit the all-inclusive nature of the Olympics.

Then again, you can forgive Boyle for the misses and the excesses. Anyone who could persuade the Queen to trot off with James Bond for the Royal High Jump gets top marks for effort.

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