What the Opening Ceremony Won’t Show

The 22nd Winter Olympics opened in Sochi on February 7—which means the world spent that week watching Russia perform internationalism and sportsmanship for a global audience while, not far from the cameras, people were being beaten in the street for being gay.

Human Rights Watch published a video just before the Games began—footage of young men in Russia attacking LGBT people in public, filming the attacks themselves, posting the recordings online. The perpetrators weren’t hiding. Most were teenagers who seemed genuinely convinced they were doing something righteous. In their understanding, gay and bisexual people are sick, and violence is a reasonable treatment. Putin’s anti-gay propaganda law, passed in 2013, didn’t invent this attitude—it licensed it. It turned a prejudice into policy and policy into permission.

The IOC chose Sochi anyway. The sponsors chose Sochi anyway. The athletes mostly came anyway, and I don’t entirely blame them—four years of training is four years of training, and it’s easy for the rest of us to say they should have stayed home. But the spectacle itself isn’t complicated. A country that beats people in the street and then lights a torch and asks the world to watch isn’t presenting an ambiguous proposition.

I watched some of the opening ceremony. The production values were extraordinary. You almost forget, for a few minutes, what you know.