He thanked his supporters, then told the athletes inside Maracana Stadium that he had a humble request.
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After the oaths by an athlete, coach and official, the party really got started with samba. He will be replacing his ally-turned-enemy, suspended President Dilma Rousseff.
Much has already been made of the legacy that these Games will leave behind for Brazil and for Rio, or the lack thereof.
Following the ceremony, the Olympic flame was taken to the center of Rio de Janeiro where a second cauldron was lit. Their show didn’t rely on expensive mechanical audacities; they resorted to what the program described as “analogue inventiveness”.
“I’m talking to the whole planet”, said Nuzman, a former volleyball player who competed at the 1964 Tokyo Games.
Brazil invited 3 billion people watching around the world to join in its four-hour party that promised to stretch into the morning with a massive after-party in the streets. Rio de Janeiro is a city whose residents love to be outside: from the girls who skateboard down the Ipanema coast to the men sharing icy beers on plastic sidewalk tables. The city does not walk, it cruises, a backbeat floating in the warm air, needing nothing but shorts and flip-flops. The floor projection, the dancers, the athletes-what a show! Images on the turf first showed a creation-of-Earth story – molecules, smoke, creatures crawling from the sea.
What it lacked in flash, Rio made up for with feeling.
A crowded dancefloor scene partied below as the music tore punters out of their seats into an eclectic mix of dance styles. Today we are taking a new direction.
There was no glossing over history either: from the arrival of the Portuguese and their conquest of the indigenous populations to the use of African slave labor for 400 years.
Temer was booed loudly as he introduced the torch lighting at the end of the opening ceremony. The intention, he said, was “to focus more on the world and the future”, but it will be viewed through a hypocritical lens in many quarters. The audience sang along.
THE MARACANÃ OCCUPIES a conflicted place in Brazil’s rich sporting tradition. Athletes from Cameroon wore traditional flowing robes, those from communist-led Cuba had outfits designed by a French luxury footwear designer; those from Australia wore seersuckers and shorts, as if preparing for an afternoon of yachting.
It was a golden class of flag bearers with arguably the greatest swimmer of all time Michael Phelps taking on the duties for the preppy clothed United States, and 14-time major victor Rafael Nadal and current Wimbledon champion Andy Murray did the same for Spain and Great Britain respectively. History’s greatest Olympian will be looking to add to his record haul of 22 medals, in three individual swims plus relays, before the August 21 closing ceremony.
It was wonderful to get to carry the flag and but also be around the rest of the British team and chat to the guys.
That might have been an unfortunate word choice, in light of the doping scandal involving the Russian team that led into these Games.
The two-hour Parade of Nations featured Afghanistan, Zimbabwe and the 205 nations in between, including the first Refugee Olympic Team, which received a loud roar from the crowd.
It was a celebration – a celebration of the city and the country, a celebration of the Olympics, a celebration of the athletes.
Before the entry of hundreds of the 11,000 athletes that will be competing in the Games, the playful rhythms of the ceremony gave way to a sober message about climate change and rampant deforestation of the Amazon. In an interview on the 2016 Rio Olympics website, Meirelles talked about how his ambitions were forced to shrink along with the vanishing budget. “Now the state is spending 700,000 reals”. “On the other hand, it is good in some way because we are in a moment in the world where we need to be reasonable with the way we spend money”.
That scaled down ambitions fit well with the frustrated mood across many parts of Rio. In this Olympic world, there’s one universal law for everybody. One man was arrested. Beatriz Nunes, 34, a teacher at the march, said that when some protesters tried to cross a police line, officers responded with tear gas and the percussion grenade.
Protests earlier in the day 10 miles away at the Copacabana Palace served as a reminder of the uneasiness in this city, which spent billions it doesn’t have to host the Games.
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Brazil’s Bovespa Index gained 14.8% in the year after Rio bagged the hosting rights to the 2016 Games, but has lately been hobbled by commodity price weakness and a deep recession, while sticky inflation has forced the local central bank to hike up interest rates to a nine-year high of 14.25%.
