While the Games Happened

The Sochi Olympics were starting in a matter of days when Human Rights Watch released footage of teenagers beating gay people in the street. They’d filmed it themselves. The kids doing it didn’t see anything wrong—they were just fixing sick people, healing them with their fists, doing what they thought was right. Casual. Methodical. On camera.

I couldn’t get the video out of my head. Not because the violence itself was shocking—I’d seen worse, we all have—but because of how normal it looked. How much it fit into the world around it. The Olympic ceremonies being prepared. The news crews setting up. The patriotic broadcasts ramping up. And underneath all that, in plain daylight, the hunting. It was all happening at the same time.

What struck me was the confidence in their violence. These weren’t people operating in shadow or shame. They were teenagers in Russia doing what their culture had taught them was correct. And nobody important seemed to want to talk about it. The Olympics were more important. The story that mattered was the one about the games.

I don’t know what I expected. That Putin’s Russia would suddenly develop a conscience for the cameras? But the gap between what the world was watching and what was actually happening just sat there, impossible to ignore if you looked.