Ben Blankenship of Eugene and Matthew Centrowitz, who are both running the 1500 meters in Rio, are waiting in OR rather than marching in the Olympic Opening Ceremony.
Advertisement
Before the ceremony, the Olympic torch will travel to some of Rio’s most well-known landmarks – from the Christ the Redeemer statue to the Pao de Acucar rock formation on Guanabara Bay.
Less than 48 hours before the Olympics Opening Ceremony, Mário Andrada, the Communications Director of Rio 2016, admitted the subpar state of affairs with the Games’ organization.
Rousseff will not attend the opening ceremony, while former ally-turned-rival Temer – whose approval rating recently polled at 11 percent – says he is “extremely prepared” to be booed by the crowd.
Health experts differ on whether the Rio Olympic Games could spread the Zika virus far and wide or hardly at all.
(Vatican Radio) The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games is on Friday, but as things stand today: is Rio De Janeiro ready to host the biggest extravaganza in sport?.
Simone Biles is set to make her Olympic debut in Rio, but is no stranger to fierce competition.
Yet Olympic organizers can’t be faulted for trying, with their “Together we can change the world” slogan and OlympicPeace hashtag.
Millions of television viewers from around the world are expected to watch the three-hour ceremony in Rio de Janeiro on Friday night, which culminates in the lighting of the Olympic cauldron. Rio’s alarming murder rate and turf wars between drug lords and police weren’t so high on the globe’s agenda before athletes and hundreds of thousands of Olympic visitors discovered that the prospect of being in harm’s way has always been the darker flipside of Brazilian Samba, carnival and caipirinha cocktails. While not as grand as opening ceremonies past, Rio still expects to wow.
Brazil, he added, had the “last garden in the world” in Amazon and this needed to be protected, though the message would not be that the world would end because of global warming.
The event will feature 500 musicians – including stars Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso and Elza Soares – and the recitation of poem in English and Portuguese by Dame Judi Dench and Brazil’s Fernanda Montenegro, respectively. Supermodel Gisele Bundchen will also be on hand.
In all, 4,800 performers and volunteers will be involved in the show, which is built on three basic pillars of life in Brazil.
Worries over readiness of the infrastructure have dogged the game for weeks, but Brazilian officials said they were ready to open the games with full fanfare and every requirement in place. “They’re saying in this ceremony, we are who we are, with a lot of social problems, a lot of crises in the political system, etc”.
Advertisement
Some events have already begun, with some football matches having been played already, for instance. Lego workers assembled parts of the model in Denmark, the Czech Republic and the US and later the parts were shipped for final assembly in Rio de Janeiro.
