An opening ceremony can set the tone for an Olympic Games.
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The crowd roared when Bundchen sashayed from one side of the 78,000-seat Maracana Stadium to the other, as Tom Jobim’s grandson, Daniel, played his grandfather’s famous song about the Ipanema girl “tall and tan and young and lovely”.
These are hard times for a country that was enjoying rapid economic growth when Rio won the right to host the Games but is now in recession and with a government in tatters. “That’s what we are all about”.
Security challenges in the sprawling beachside city are at the forefront of many people’s mind, not only because of Rio’s decades-old reputation for violent street crime, but also after a spate of deadly attacks at big and small celebrations from Europe to the United States.
The ceremony’s opening themes were world peace and the environment. Which, not coincidentally, highlighted one of Rio 2016’s biggest failures, as ambitious plans to improve sanitation and clean up polluted waterways in this sprawling city have fallen disastrously short.
“Only God is more important than my health”, Pele said in a statement reported widely by the Brazilian media.
There then followed the first ever awarding of an “Olympic laurel” to Kenyan running great Kip Keino, before the traditional unfurling of the Olympic Flag, rendition of the Olympic Anthem and recitation of Olympic oaths. A bit of gambiarra there, too, possibly.
Once the athletes had entered the stadium, Brazil’s interim President Michel Temer declared open the games to jeers by some in the crowd of 60,000 spectators, a reflection of ongoing political repercussions from the impeachment proceedings against suspended President Dilma Rousseff. As a way of short-circuiting the boos in the stadium Friday night, Temer kept his speech brief.
Of course, all the angst only draws more attention. And after consecutive weeks of divisiveness on display with the national political conventions, the next 16 days are a chance for Americans to root for one team for a change.
Michael Phelps will lead the US team, the largest with 549 competitors. NBC did not get its way in the order of the Parade of Nations. The Greeks say the athlete has left the Olympic Village.
“Somebody said it was about eight hours”, Phelps said. “I’m leading, for me, the best country in the world”.
It’s a USA team that’ll be favored to win the medal count again, led by a record 292 women in the 555-member delegation.
The Rio Olympics officially launched Friday with its opening ceremony, a massive production that has come to mark the beginning of every Olympics.
Dozens of athletes have failed doping tests at the last two Olympics, most caught in recent retests of stored samples.
The cannonball-shaped cauldron was lit by Brazilian marathoner Vanderlei Cordeiro de Lima. He moved to Rochester Hills to train last fall and will start graduate school at Michigan State later this month.
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Keino said, “Join me and support all the youth of this world to get the basics of humanity: food, shelter and education”. For years before Athens, no one thought those games were going to happen.
