OPENING CEREMONY TAKES GOLD
| By Matthew Engel | | Monday, August 11, 2008 |
The most certain victory of the Olympic Games was duly ratified on Friday when China won the gold medal in the opening ceremony competition – presumably for all time.
No country ever has – or surely will – match the Chinese in the effort, human power, synchronicity, ingenuity and, it has to be said, money they were willing to put into what was once a little show to start a big sporting event. Now it is an enormous show and a gigantic event.
And after an awesome if seemingly interminable four hours of performance and ceremonial, President Hu Jintao of China formally declared the games of the 29th Olympiad open.
Then the evening finally descended – or rather ascended – into pure kitsch when the gymnast-turned-businessman Li Ning was winched up to roof level to complete a lap of vertigo and light the flame. It seemed like one trick too many.
Otherwise the first triumph belonged to the evening's auteur Zhang Yimou. Inflation of expectations at opening ceremonies began at least with the Disneyfication of the games at Los Angeles in 1984. Last night it reached its apex with a show of astounding ambition.
The theme was along traditional lines: nationalism with Chinese characteristics. But Zhang executed it all with unprecedented panache – cunningly using the design of the Bird's Nest stadium for his purposes – and budgetary freedom. The £50m mentioned in the Chinese media seemed like a gross underestimate. This was a show that began with 2,008 drummers, and then got more ambitious.
London four years hence will inevitably seem like amateur dramatics in comparison and sensible Londoners would hope that no one would even try to match it. Fifty million could buy quite a few new buses.
The Bird's Nest played slightly less of a starring role, beautiful though it is. The 91,000 spectators inside may or may not have noticed the “hierarchy of intimate spaces” allowing for “unexpected moments of privacy and solitude”, which enraptured the architectural critic of the New York Times on his presumably private visit.
They will have noticed the heat rising up to the roof over the stands, making the evening considerably hotter inside the stadium than it was outside. The official Olympic website said there was “a soft breeze” – so soft that a special wind machine was installed in the flagpoles to ensure the flags fluttered. The air was more like bird's nest soup.
There was no downpour, though. And last night nothing could have dampened Chinese ardour on a night of national unity and celebration, which one old China hand thought might not have been seen in Beijing since the 15th-century heyday of the Ming dynasty.
The 204 competing nations and quasi-nations – number 205, Brunei was a last-minute withdrawal – marched or sauntered (according to national taste) round what will become the running track to their appointed places.
It's lucky this is not an especially large planet: no one could endure an evening much longer than this in such conditions, least of all the official cheerleaders who were obliged to jig non-stop for nearly two hours.
Each team was greeted by music played in rotation so that Mali, San Marino, Montenegro and North Korea were piped in to the tune of Scotland the Brave; Oman had what sounded like the tango.
There were big cheers for China's little rival, Taiwan (diplomatically called Chinese Taipei in this event) and for the team billed as Hong Kong, China, which sounds like a postal address.
Sometimes the crowd took notice of politics beyond their own corner of the globe. Iraq got a special roar, which was interpreted as an anti-American gesture. So did Russia, which was more surprising. The welcome for the US team, which stretched out almost to infinity, was patchy.
Hardly anyone noticed the individual athletes whose presence was often the result of extraordinary endurance and suffering, like the one-legged swimmer Natalie du Toit who carried South Africa's flag; or the Sudanese refugee-cum-middle distance runner Lopez Lomong, who, in a highly political gesture, was given the job for the US; or the Cambodian marathon runner Hem Bunting, who lives in a fly-blown dormitory at the ramshackle national stadium where he trains.
There was the Sudanese team itself, which does its weight-training using paint pots filled with concrete; the Kenyans, several of whom suffered grievously in the recent violence, and the benighted Zimbabweans. Switzerland's flagbearer, on the other hand, was the squillionaire Roger Federer. They were all blessed to be there: the rich, the poor, the long, the short and the tall.
But the athletes knew they were not the stars of the show, because then the stadium erupted for the Chinese. Their flag was carried higher than anyone else's, but then it was carried by the 7ft 6in basketball player Yao Ming.
It was China's night, an occasion when a people's republic felt, for once, like just that. It will probably be their fortnight.
The 204 competing nations and quasi-nations – number 205, Brunei was a last-minute withdrawal – marched or sauntered (according to national taste) round what will become the running track to their appointed places.
It's lucky this is not an especially large planet: no one could endure an evening much longer than this in such conditions, least of all the official cheerleaders who were obliged to jig non-stop for nearly two hours.
Each team was greeted by music played in rotation so that Mali, San Marino, Montenegro and North Korea were piped in to the tune of Scotland the Brave; Oman had what sounded like the tango.
There were big cheers for China's little rival, Taiwan (diplomatically called Chinese Taipei in this event) and for the team billed as Hong Kong, China, which sounds like a postal address.
Sometimes the crowd took notice of politics beyond their own corner of the globe. Iraq got a special roar, which was interpreted as an anti-American gesture. So did Russia, which was more surprising. The welcome for the US team, which stretched out almost to infinity, was patchy.
Hardly anyone noticed the individual athletes whose presence was often the result of extraordinary endurance and suffering, like the one-legged swimmer Natalie du Toit who carried South Africa's flag; or the Sudanese refugee-cum-middle distance runner Lopez Lomong, who, in a highly political gesture, was given the job for the US; or the Cambodian marathon runner Hem Bunting, who lives in a fly-blown dormitory at the ramshackle national stadium where he trains.
There was the Sudanese team itself, which does its weight-training using paint pots filled with concrete; the Kenyans, several of whom suffered grievously in the recent violence, and the benighted Zimbabweans. Switzerland's flagbearer, on the other hand, was the squillionaire Roger Federer. They were all blessed to be there: the rich, the poor, the long, the short and the tall.
But the athletes knew they were not the stars of the show, because then the stadium erupted for the Chinese. Their flag was carried higher than anyone else's, but then it was carried by the 7ft 6in basketball player Yao Ming.
It was China's night, an occasion when a people's republic felt, for once, like just that. It will probably be their fortnight. |
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发表于 2008-8-13 18:39
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