The 75-year-old has been in Rio de Janeiro in the build-up to the opening ceremony to launch an academy in his name. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY.
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So the athletes were recast as a “planters army”, each given a tree seed that they placed in a pod, which will in turn be planted in an “Athletes forest” near one of the venues.
Clearly a Brazilian ceremony was going to celebrate the rainforest, represented by a stream of green light. She’ll be the first goalkeeper in history to reach the milestone in worldwide play – no small feat.
Under cloudless blue skies, former Brazilian women’s volleyball player, Maria Isabel Barroso Salgado, lifted the flame beneath the giant statue of Christ that overlooks downturn Rio and the waters of Guanabara Bay.
The biggest cheers for Bach’s speech came when he started by reminding everybody that these are the first Olympics to be staged in South America, and then when he welcomed the team of refugee athletes, saying the Olympics were the answer to the world’s “growing selfishness”.
NBC, a unit of Comcast Corp, has the USA media rights for South America’s first Olympic Games and said it decided not to show the ceremony live because its producers and commentators wanted time to put it into context for Americans.
The ceremony’s creative director Fernando Meirelles had a smaller budget than his predecessors, including the mastermind of London 2012’s memorable show Danny Boyle, but he promised “the coolest party”.
Supermodel Gisele Bundchen shimmered to the tune of “The Girl from Ipanema”.
Brazil has the largest population of people of Japanese descent in the world.
“They’re talking about slavery?” “You have transformed the wonderful city of Rio de Janeiro into a modern metropolis and made it even more handsome”. “They have to talk about that”.
Next up, the construction of Brazil’s major cities. It was unlike Beijing 2008 or London 2012 in regards to pomp and glamour and lavishness, yet the show at the Maracana left its audience feeling fulfilled with a soulful, vibrant and ingenious display of life – the authentic South American life.
“This is a conquest”. The environmental message, while handsome, seemed odd given that officials also failed to keep a promise to clean up the city’s sewer-infested waterways, including now infamous Guanabara Bay, where athletes will compete in a number of water sports. This is not the right way and it is sad that it is like this that we are hosting people from around the world. Actresses Judi Dench and Fernanda Montenegro lent their voices for a classic poem about hope for the future.
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Under the gaze of the city’s iconic Christ the Redeemer statue, former marathon runner Vanderlei Cordeiro de Lima lit an eco-friendly Olympic cauldron created to draw attention to the damage caused by fossil fuels and greenhouse gases.
