It’s not quite Rimbaud’s bateau ivre, but in the boat carrying the blue delegation some intoxication, some healthy beautiful intoxication, is in the air.
In the spectacular parade of athletes on the Seine, in strict French alphabetical order, ours is number 91. The wave motions, in the rhythm of the unique catwalk in the history of the Olympics, increase and so does the water from above, that insistent rain that has somewhat spoiled the aesthetic and architectural and scenic grandeur desired by Macron.
To our Arianna Errigo, co-host of the team, fencing star, the makeup and wig melt away in a flash but not the happiness of a moment that will necessarily remain unique. She and Tamberi, the tightrope walker captain of athletics, climb higher than anyone to wave our flag and shout “Italy Italy,” but in the chaos of the drunken boat Tamberi loses his wedding ring in the river.
Almost immediately the agencies come out, but water polo colleagues console the champion already troubled by the rebuke of his young wife embraced in mondovision at the Rome Olympics: lost one gold you will find another. Brilliant.
In a famous Maupassant story “Sur l’eau,” about water, the semantic protagonist of the evening, a group of swimmers consoles a prostitute who has just lost the child of “one of them ” by telling her: we will make you another .
Literature aside, politics does not leave the scene beyond the rhetoric of Olympic sports as inclusion and overcoming conflict. In the same boat as the Azzurri, below, are the Israelis, covered in boos from the crowds on the banks of the Seine. Remember the flags of Israel burned during pro-Gaza demonstrations and the suspicions about ‘anti-Semitism always alive in France? Meanwhile, suspended between politics and sports, our super active Mattarella has already won his own medal, the symbolic one of being at the right time in the right place in the right way. Even in the rain, even with a cellophane sheet to protect himself from the water, the great unifying goddess of this formidable evening.
The article Moving party on the Seine and Tamberi loses faith comes from TheNewyorker.
