LONDON — Across the street from the Horse Guards Parade, Winston Churchill’s voice echoes throughout a basement chamber of rooms, rooms you can argue were among the most vital ever constructed, snippets of speeches that helped rescue a planet.
These are the Cabinet War Rooms, where the most important men of Great Britain sought cover during the worst hours of the Blitz, where they mapped out strategies as war raged throughout the world and bombs fell on their city, and bravely tried to forest morale and hope at a time when neither was in abundant supply.
You leave here and Churchill’s words ring in your ears, so much so that when you climb the steps of the grandstand at beach volleyball — held at Horse Guards — and watch people dive and spike and get themselves generally very sandy, you can’t help but go to your worst British accent and declare, “We will play them on the beaches …”
But it’s Churchill’s most famous and lasting speech that really resonates as you wander here and elsewhere at these Olympics, and when you look at medal standings, and when you think about what these Games might well have been if you had access to Doc Brown’s DeLorean:
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe … [which] lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow …”
You hear those words, it doesn’t take long to flash back to long-ago days when you could convince yourselves that one of these days there might just be tanks rolling down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway if we weren’t careful. And a time when these Olympics took on something like a religious fervor, rather than the big backyard barbecue they’ve become lately, especially in this welcoming city.
There was a time when Americans who wouldn’t ever darken the sports pages of a newspaper would hungrily grab them four weeks every four years to scan the medal standings at the Olympics. You could never reduce the arms race or the SALT talks to neat agate type; you had to settle for advantages in shades of gold, silver and bronze.
Now, that’s more a curiosity than an obsession. We’re either first (if you count overall medals, 81) or second (if, as the IOC does, you go by golds, 34). China is our dance partner at the top of the list at 77 and 36. And if you ask most folks, that’s perfectly acceptable; China out-populates us 4-to-1. They’re South Bend Central. We’re Hickory High.
Maybe if you use the same arithmetic it’s a little unsettling just how close Great Britain is to us in third place — as an aside: God bless the Olympics, where you can use terms like “us” and ��we” and nobody thinks to blink — with only 12 fewer golds, only 33 fewer medals and only 260,137,516 fewer citizens.
“The first half of the London Games has been a spectacular success that has transformed a naturally cautious British public into a nation of delirious cheerleaders,” Sebastian Coe, the chief of these Games and a former gold medalist, wrote recently and he’s right.
But scattered beneath the top three lies the remnants of what used to fuel these Games. If you know your history and your geography, you know that Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Moldova, Tajikistan, Estonia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijin are 12 of the 14 republics that used to wear “USSR” (actually CCCP) across their uniform jerseys.
And entering yesterday, that collective had 94 medals. That would’ve been unacceptable back in the day (even if only a third of those medals are gold), back when the term “iron curtain” inspired awe and fear and didn’t conjure a car anti-theft device. Now we live in a world where Churchill’s England adores Maria Sharapova and tried to nudge the Lithuanian basketball team to a huge upset last weekend.
Fellowship rather than fear, togetherness over terror. It does make for a better world. If also a less passionate Olympics.