LET THE GAMES BEGIN
Dazzling opening ceremonies kick off Summer Olympics
Team Canada’s athletes receive a warm welcome as they march into Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, during the opening ceremonies for the 2016 Summer Olympics.
As a near-perfect metaphor for the Rio Olympics themselves, the opening ceremony’s budget was cut in half and the show staged in a stadium that opened for the 1950 World Cup, but wasn’t finished until 1965.
Problems? The Rio Games have a few, even if we’re not sure about that report of a kayaker capsizing when his boat hit a submerged sofa at the canoeing venue Friday.
But somehow, the show always goes on and this one — economy version or not — was a fascinating combination of joyful music and serious message, including the first-ever active role for the athletes of all the nations, who were given seedlings in soil-filled cartridges as they entered the massive Maracana Stadium.
It was supposed to be low on technology given the oft-slashed budget, but it had enough creative video projections on the white-covered stadium floor to make for an evening that didn’t look overly austere.
It was, in fact, pretty cool, capped by the entrance to a tremendous standing ovation by the Refugee Olympic Team, surpassed only in volume by the reception for the team that came next, the wildly-cheered hosts.
“The best place in the world is here and now,” said the chair of the much-mocked organizing committee, Carlos Nuzman. “I am the proudest man alive.”
That it was Michel Temer, the acting president of Brazil, who declared the Games of the XXXI Olympiad open ( because the actual President Dilma Rousseff is facing impeachment over corruption allegations) was just one more stone in Rio’s shoe — Temer was roundly booed.
The oddest part of the evening was what the Brazilian producers elected not to show. Or show much of.
What is Brazil to the rest of the world? Soccer. Samba. Carnival. “Hot women,” as choreographer Deborah Colker put it. A country usually celebrates what made it famous internationally, even when it comes dangerously close to self-parody.
Soccer was shut out entirely, even with the lighting of the cauldron, which was by marathoner Vanderlei de Lima, possibly after Pele was unable to come due to ill health. The most scantily clad torso seen all night belonged to the oiled-up flag bearer from Tonga, taekwondo athlete Pita Nikolas Taufatofua.
The athletes were serenaded with Samba as they entered, but there was no sense of Carnival’s racy heat. Trying not to be cliché ridden, it may have tried a little too hard.
Brazil’s collapsed economy has been evident in every aspect of the Games’ infrastructure and dramatic cost-cutting — even with money lent to the organizing committee by the IOC to make ends temporarily meet — has left shortfalls everywhere and many areas that the TV cameras won’t capture resembling construction sites.
“Our admiration is even greater because you managed this at a very difficult time in Brazilian history. We have always believed in you,” IOC president Thomas Bach said in his speech.
To their credit the show’s producers didn’t sweep the problems under the carpet, but made them a part of the overall picture of a country that may be suffering terrible deprivations, but is making the best of what it has with high spirits.
The show grabbed the audience from the start with a thoroughly moving guitar-and-violin rendition of the Brazilian national anthem, sung powerfully by Paulinho da Viola.
The video projections showed a changing landscape from a stylized pure jungle to the arrival of the various cultures that came to populate the rainforest, moving the scenery forward rapidly to a recreation of the first flight of Alberto Santos-Dumont, who Brazilians believe invented the airplane.
From there, the music took over, starting with Brazilian supermodel (and Tom Brady’s wife) Gisele Bundchen doing her last catwalk, 150 metres’ worth, to The Girl From Ipanema, which might as well be Brazil’s other anthem, so enduring has it been, this time sung and played by Daniel Jobim. It was great even without Stan Getz’ saxophone.
It transitioned from there into harder-edged music from the favelas, the poor neighbourhoods where the majority of Rio’s population dwells, always moving forward in time until it hit today and the subtext of the whole show: the age of man-made destruction of the planet. It was a message that probably wouldn’t sell in the U.S. or any of the highly industrialized nations, but which resonates in a country whose rainforest remains the world’s largest garden.
The irony, of course, is that the Olympics is one more monument to modern excess that many ordinary Brazilians could have done without and want even less now that the economy is in the tank.
The road-to-ruin segment was a little preachy, but it needs saying.
Said Fernando Meirelles, the director: “This is the best platform you have to tell the whole world, three billion people (watching).”
The last movement before the parade of nations was a return of the stadium floor to its rainforest genesis and the seedlings the athletes were given, from as many varieties of trees as there are nations entered, 207, are to be planted in what will become the Athletes’ Forest in the Deodoro neighbourhood of Rio.
Canada was led into the stadium by our lone gold medallist from 2012 in London, trampolinist Rosie MacLennan, a modest choice next to tennis stars Rafael Nadal carrying Spain’s colours, Caroline Wozniacki for Denmark, Andy Murray for Great Britain and swim superstar Michael Phelps for the U.S.
“It’s something for every sportsman to be proud of and, of course, especially for me after not being in London,” said Nadal, who would have been Spain’s flag bearer in 2012, but had to withdraw due to injury.
Meirelles had said he hoped the event would be “a drug for depression in Brazil.”
But not far from the gates of Maracana, police used tear gas on anti- Olympic protesters. Evidently, some kinds of depression aren’t susceptible to pageantry.