Company of heroes 2 dazzle skin3/9/2024 ![]() ![]() Enthusiastic crowds flocked to the venues, many clad in the bright, trendy and expensive clothing of Bosco, the fashion chain that dressed the Russian team and provided the garish technicolor outfits of the 18,500 Olympic volunteers. Not so much faster, higher, stronger more like costlier, shinier, bling-ier. True, one cannot psychoanalyze a whole country based on a sporting event, but there were moments at the Olympics that illustrated an age-old tension in Russia: on the one hand an intense Slav pride and belief in the country’s unique destiny, on the other a desire to imitate the West and out-dazzle it. Whose idea was it to get a choir of policemen to perform Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky”, with a couple of soloists grooving on down while their ranks of colleagues stood stiffly in peaked caps, ties, and olive-green uniforms with yellow brocade? Take the opening ceremony, where scenes of lyrical beauty, like a glittering ball where hundreds of dancers recreated a famous passage from Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”, were interspersed with ludicrous cheesy moments. ![]() Winston Churchill famously called Russia “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”, and the country’s contradictions and incongruities were on full view in Sochi. ![]() REUTERS/Alexei Nikolsky/RIA Novosti/Kremlin Russian President Vladimir Putin answers a journalist's question during a televised news conference in Sochi January 19, 2014. ![]()
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