While Brazil’s controversial interim President Michel Temer gave an address at the Opening Ceremony.
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Watch all the best bits from the Rio 2016 Olympics opening ceremony in the video above.
Bundchen, one of the world’s most sought-after models, delightedly accepted the invitation to the Olympics, a lovely finishing touch to her career, before more than 70,000 people at Maracana and a worldwide TV audience of some 3 billion viewers.
Rio’s opening ceremony also looked at the country’s history, going back to the lives of the indigenous people, the arrival of the Portuguese, their mass enslavement of Africans, and the later influxes of different immigrant groups to the country.
Stretching almost four hours, the opening ceremony turned from a celebration of Brazilian history, music and culture into an appeal to help save the environment and come together as human beings.
Home to the Amazon, the world’s largest forest, Brazil used the ceremony to call on the 3 billion people watching the opening of the world’s premiere sporting event to take care of the planet, plant seeds and reconquer the verdant land that Europeans found here five centuries ago.
Almost every news story surrounding this year’s Olympic Games in Rio has been kind of a downer.
The capper on the evening came when Brazilian marathoner Vanderlei Cordeiro de Lima lit the Olympic cauldron.
After the grandeur of Beijing’s opening ceremony in 2008 and the high-tech, cheeky inventiveness of London’s in 2012, Rio’s was earthier and less swish but more sobering with its gloomy environmental look at the future and deliberate penny-pinching. In the almost four-hour event, nothing appeared to go awry.
Rio 2016 Committee president Carlos Nuzman sounded a triumphant note after a seven-year buildup to the games that was plagued by problems including rising crime, health scares, pollution worries and severe financial hardship.
Supermodel Gisele entered to the strains of the bossa nova classic “The Girl from Ipanema”, walking into the stadium to loud cheers. Everyone performed for free.
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”.
Temer, flanked by dozens of heads of state, played a minor role in the ceremony, speaking just a few words. He will be replacing his ally-turned-enemy, suspended President Dilma Rousseff.
Britain may see its first flourish of medals on Saturday, with Chris Froome hoping to add to his third Tour de France victory in July with a gold in the men’s road race, and judoka Ashley McKenzie in the bronze round of the men’s 60kg.
The creative minds behind the opening ceremony were determined to put on a show that would not offend a country in dire economic straits but would showcase the famously upbeat nature of Brazilians.
It started with the beginning of life itself in Brazil, and the population that formed in the vast forests and built their communal huts, the ocas.
In all, 4,800 performers and volunteers will be involved in the show created to showcase Brazil as a garden of the world.
“They’re talking about slavery?”
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“No one who likes Brazil would do something like that”, he complained. “They have to talk about that”.
