Athletes from 206 nations and members of the refugee team performing under the Olympic flag will compete for 306 sets of medals in 28 sports at the first-ever Olympics to be held in South America.
Advertisement
There was a music section that depicted how divided the world is now, because of these cultural differences, which culminated with a sort of musical showdown that included Brazilian originals like Samba and Passinho.
The Olympic opening ceremony was seen by an estimated 26.5 million viewers in the United States, a sharp 35 percent drop from the audience who watched the pageantry from London four years ago.
Brazil’s most iconic sports figure wasn’t a part of one of its biggest sports nights.
But still, it’s an early warning sign that the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro may not be the smash success of the London Games. “We have always believed in you”, IOC President Thomas Bach said.
On a night in which Brazilian Olympic Committee and Rio Organizing President Carlos Arthur Nuzman said Rio was “talking to the whole planet”, the International Olympic Committee and local organizers seemed to send a mix message and at times even veered into a state of denial given the landscape, both political and economic, across the newest Olympic city.
Michel Temer, a 75-year-old law professor, became acting president after the Senate voted in favour of launching an impeachment trial against Ms Rousseff, suspending her.
Also, the first time in Summer Games history, a woman led the athletes into Opening Ceremonies.
A marathon bronze medal victor in Athens in 2004, he has been held up as a model sportsman after refusing to give up when a protestor attacked him in that race, slowing him from first to third. Their flag-bearer, Rose Nathike Lokonyen, fled war in South Sudan and ran her first race in a refugee camp in northern Kenya.
Each athlete was presented with a seed and a cartridge of soil to enable them to plant a native tree of Brazil, which will ultimately form an “Athletes Forest” made up of 207 different species – one for each delegation. In the seven years since the IOC awarded Rio the games, local advocacy and domestic and global human rights groups have consistently complained to the IOC, local organizers and the local and federal governments that they haven’t had a voice in shaping an Olympics that will impact the city for decades.
Michael Phelps will lead the US team, the largest with 549 competitors.
On behalf of all 11,288 competitors (6,182 men; 5,106 women), Brazilian two-time Olympic champion sailor Robert Scheidt pledged that they won’t take banned drugs – an oath likely to ring false to fans after the scandal of government-orchestrated cheating in Russian Federation.
Advertisement
Celebrities have begun to play a larger role in Olympic opening and closing ceremonies and Rio did not disappoint on that front.
