“I’m gonna be there for the Opening Ceremony, I am”.
Advertisement
Brazilian football great Pele will not be attending the Olympic opening ceremony due to ill health.
After seven years of preparations for Friday’s opening at the Maracana stadium, organizers hope the start of the Games will turn the page on months of bad publicity for Rio, over everything from crime and polluted water to faulty plumbing at the athletes’ village and worries about the Zika virus.
Overall, the atmosphere in the Maracana Stadium was celebratory, as a succession of actors, dancers and musicians raced through routines meant to showcase Brazil’s culture, diversity and history, even finding time for a brief lecture on environmental issues.
The biggest cheers for Bach’s speech came when he welcomed the team of refugee athletes, saying the Olympics were the answer to the world’s “growing selfishness”. There are 11,000 athletes competing in the Games.
The Olympic broadcaster promises the “BBC Sport 360” application will give viewers a closer view on the games, which start on 5 August.
We’d had the fear of God put in us by media officials about fighting traffic on the 45-minute journey across town to the stadium so arrived nearly three hours before kick-off.
Phelps is the only the second American swimmer to carry the flag, after Gary Hall in 1976 in Montreal.
The Games were declared open by acting president Michel Temer, who restricted himself to just 14 words but was loudly booed. The leader who was supposed to preside over the Games, President Dilma Rousseff, was suspended last May to face an impeachment trial and tweeted that she was “sad to not be at the party”.
President of the Rio Olympic Organizing Committee Carlos Nuzman and International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach both spoke with pride and stressed the importance of Olympic values and multiculturalism.
The Portuguese bobbed to shore in boats, the African slaves rolled in on wheels and together they ploughed through the forests and planted the seeds of modern Brazil.
And the roar the crowd gave the likes of Spain’s Rafael Nadal and the United States team, led by Michael Phelps, would support the view that has been growing that Rio is ready to forget its concerns about the broken political system, struggling economy and alarming Zika virus to enjoy its moment as the centre of the world’s attention. Like Rio itself, they reliably provoke wonder.
The IOC’s decision not to impose a blanket ban on Russia over revelations of a state-sponsored doping program opened the door to legal turmoil which left the precise make-up of the Russian team in limbo.
Iran picked a woman, archer Zahra Nemati, as flag-bearer for its team made up overwhelmingly of men.
Brazilian marathon runner Vanderlei Cordeiro de Lima, a bronze medallist in Athens in 2004, lit the Olympic cauldron, a small and low-emission model befitting the environmental theme of these Games. Another woman pushed Nemati’s wheelchair.
That was never going to be an issue for Brazil’s team, which brought the parade to its traditional conclusion five minutes short of two hours, and only five minutes behind schedule.
After the grandeur of Beijing’s opening ceremony in 2008 and the high-tech, cheeky inventiveness of London’s in 2012, Rio’s was expected to be more earthy, with funk, samba and joie de vivre laced with more serious messages from the country with the world’s largest forest, the Amazon, for the need to protect the planet. “We are calling for action”, said Fernando Meirelles, one of the directors of the show.
It was a heck of a statement, coming after a lengthy segment on global warming.
“When 40 per cent of the homes in Brazil have no sanitation, you can’t really be spending a billion (dollars) for a show”.
Advertisement
“The responsibility of the decisions are mine, where I have always tried not to disappoint my family and the people of Brazil”.
