Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Goal!
When art, comedy and sports collide
Something curious happened during the gold medal awards ceremony of the hockey finals in the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. The medal presenter, the President of the International Olympic Committee Juan Antonio Samaranch, after having gone down the line, awarding gold medals to the members of the Czech national team, who had just beaten their arch rivals the Russians, was about to give one of the medals to a strange man standing between the hockey players. He was dressed, not in uniform like the others, but in sweats and holding the Czech flag. As if seeing a red flag instead, Samaranch sized up the man and thought that he didn’t quite belong. He went in close at first, holding out the gold medal’s sash in that way that is obvious to everyone watching what is about to happen, a landing on the subject’s neck and shoulders. The strange man looks as if expecting the award. But in a split second decision, Samaranch withdraws the award and quickly moves to the next person down the line. A smile appears on the strange man’s face, followed by a head shake, eliciting signs of both disbelief and embarrassment. Millions of people across the world watched in disbelief with him, including the man’s parents.
The strange man was, of course, not a stranger at all, but the Czech national hockey team’s substitute goaltender, Milan Hnilicka. Obviously, he was always meant to receive the gold medal, but his clothes betrayed his role on the team, and by extension his own sense of self. Hnilicka wasn’t just a substitute goalie, he was the 3rd in line substitute, which meant that, in the unlikely scenario that Dominik Hasek, the unassailable number one and the Czech goalkeeper GOAT, was to be replaced for some inexplicable reason, Hnilicka would still have to wait for the same thing to happen to the number two substitute. He knew that the likelihood of this scenario was virtually zero, so he regularly appeared for the games dressed only in the symbolic athletic wear of the national team, leaving his uniform in the dressing room. After the final game he simply grabbed a flag and went out on the ice with the rest of the team. He never thought he’d be the subject of a ‘viral moment’ in hockey and art history. But then, Samaranch happened.
Hnilicka did everything that was expected of him; he showed up, he trained, he attended press events and social functions. He was proud of his nomination to the national team, as were his parents, even though he knew he wasn’t going to appear on the ice very much, or at all. The team was, after all, the most important element. The team wasn’t just Hasek or Jaromir Jagr. They didn’t win the gold by themselves, it was all of them, together.
In a bizarre twist of fate, Hnilicka did eventually become famous, but for an entirely different reason and in a way he never expected. Recognizing the absurdity of the moment, the actor Jaroslav Dusek and composer Martin Smolka used it as inspiration to write one of the weirdest operas of the modern era, casting Hnilicka as the main character in their story. The opera had a world premiere in 2004 at the Czech National Theater in Prague and it opened to a full house. Even the legendary former president Vaclav Havel attended, though none of the players from the hockey team that won the gold did.
At the time people didn’t quite know what to make of the opera. Was it serious, or was it a joke, was it a celebration or a backhanded compliment? In a now established Czech tradition, it was a bit of both. Dusek and Smolka decided to tread in the same footsteps as their literary forebears, the anarchist writer Jaroslav Hasek, creator of the national ‘hero’ Josef Svejk, the writer and comedy duo Ladislav Smoljak and Zdenek Sverak, who gave birth to the ‘greatest Czech’ legend Jara Cimrman, and absurdist playwright, former president Vaclav Havel himself. Their contribution to the Czech literary scene cannot be understated and the Dusek - Smolka duo knew this very well. Their main character, the 3rd substitute Czech national goalie Hnilicka, was to take his seat in the pantheon of these characters. They weren’t heroes in the traditional sense, transformed in the crucible of great struggle, the way that Greek gods and goddesses were. They were down-to-earth every-day characters, molded by the absurd events surrounding them. They were observers and commenters, rather than doers in the great traditions of the Western world.
The story of the opera is that of the road of the Czech national hockey team to the first ever Olympic gold medal as an independent country, all witnessed and told through the eyes of the protagonist, Milan Hnilicka. On the table are issues of national identity and self-reflection. The nation had just undergone a breakup with the Soviet Union during the Velvet Revolution in 1989 and a post-national break up with Slovakia two years later. In 1996 the Czech Republic was the runner-up in the Euro 96 soccer tournament, suffering defeat to Germany in the finals as a newly minted country, borne out of the ashes of prior, often unfavorable, political arrangements.
Hnilicka is the Josef Svejk or Gregor Samsa of his time, bearing witness to extraordinary events occurring around him, including the transformation of his country into a sporting powerhouse, for a time anyway. Through his reporting the audience experiences the strangely absurd behind-the-scenes moments through an interplay of various forces and characters, Jaromir Jagr in conversation with the ice ring portrayed by a chorus of women, the hockey puck played by an actress in a black leotard, and the character of Dominik Hasek as a literal God who sings only in Latin, because nobody quite understands how he’s able to perform his superhuman goaltending feats.
Yes, the opera is also a comedy and everyone sings. Smolka and Dusek, who wrote the libretto for the opera, placed actors in the loge of the theater who were dressed and sung sporting chorals as if they were real fans watching a hockey game. When the team scores, these fans sing in unison “Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Goal!!” During the gold medal awards ceremony, the final denouement of the opera, Samaranch sings an aria about food, betraying the real reason why he might have excluded Hnilicka from receiving the award. Hnilicka was passed over, because the Olympic President was hungry and daydreaming about seafood. After pulling away with the gold medal, Hnilicka pursues Samaranch, attempting to snatch the medal from his hands. Oblivious, Samaranch wanders off, still singing about lobster and calamari, as Hnilicka falls to the floor.
The story does have a happy ending. Milan Hnilicka did finally receive the gold medal and after the Olympics, he was signed by the New York Rangers. On their return to Prague, the Czech hockey team was mobbed by a crowd of people so large, that speculations started to circulate that more people showed up for the hockey team, than for the demonstrations during the Velvet Revolution nine years earlier. Cameras panning the crowds caught people praying to the players in supplication, as if they were actual gods.
Today the opera is largely forgotten, but the story of the nation remains as an archetypical portrait of the folk hero, who persists despite the absurdities and incongruencies of life. As such, the opera may be about the Czech team winning gold in the 1998 Winter Olympics in particular, but what it’s really about, is the triumph of human spirit against insurmountable opposition, even if that opposition is as trivial as being dissed at an awards ceremony.
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