Loud cheers erupted when Brazil’s beloved pioneer of aviation Alberto Santos-Dumont was depicted taking off from the stadium and flying over modern-day Rio.
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After one of the roughest-ever rides from vote to games by an Olympic host, the city of beaches, carnival, grinding poverty and sun-kissed wealth lifted the curtain on the games of the 31st Olympiad with a high-energy gala celebration of Brazil’s can-do spirit, biodiversity and melting pot history.
Brazilian marathon runner Vanderlei Cordeiro de Lima, who won a bronze medal at the Athens games, lights the Olympic cauldron.
Acting Brazilian President Michel Temer has opened the 2016 Summer Olympic Games at the Maracana stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as the country grapples with an economic and political crisis. 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”.
“Here is our Olympic answer: the 10,000 best athletes in the world, competing with each other, at the same time living peacefully together in one Olympic Village, sharing their meals and their emotions”.
The opening ceremony was decidedly simple and low-tech, a reflection of Brazil’s tough economic times. It looked downright cheerful, and not much like the vision of favelas that Fernando Meirelles, who directed Rio’s opening ceremony, offered in his global hit City of God in 2002. They wrote messages of peace on them, and then the kites were taken back to Rio to be flown by children in Brazil.
The athletes were being given tree seeds, plus cartridge of soil.
“In this Olympic world, we see that the values of our shared humanity are stronger than the forces which want to divide us”, Bach said.
Flagbearer Rose Nathike Lokonyen (ROT) of the Refugee Olympic Athletes leads her contingent during the opening ceremony.
While it escaped a blanket ban, Russian Federation is paying the price in the shape of a smaller team, whittled down from a 389 athletes to around 270. She was paralyzed in a vehicle accident as a teenager.
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.
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Fireworks over Maracana Stadium during the opening ceremony of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. “It is not a good message for the world”. (And, y’know, every nation in the world.) But all the depressing images of sea levels overtaking the Netherlands and Florida were at least leavened a little by the nice grace note at the end, informing us that each Olympian will be given a seed to plant, the idea being that someday, many years from now, those seeds will grow into a kind of Olympic forest.
