Rio de Janiero welcomed the world to the first Olympic Games
RIO DE JANEIRO, summer Olympics 2016 ceremony started with fireworks forming the word “Rio” in the sky, while supermodel Gisele Bundchen walked on the tune of “The Girl From Ipanema.”
Rio de Janiero welcomed the world, from singers, models, to greatest athletes, to the first Olympic Games in South America with a serious message underlying the celebration: Let’s take care of our planet!
Olympic host, the city of beaches, carnival, grinding poverty and sun-kissed wealth opened the two-week games of the 31st Olympiad with a high-energy gala celebration of Brazil’s can-do spirit, biodiversity and melting pot history.
The cut-price opening ceremony, made big moment of nation by the economic and political woes, featured performers as slaves laboring with backs bent, gravity-defying climbers hanging from the ledges of buildings in Brazil’s teeming megacities, of course dancers, all hips and wobble, grooving to thumping funk and sultry samba.
Brazil also packaged its party with solemnity, lacing the fun and frivolous show with sobering messages about global warming.
The crowd roared when Gisele Bundchen, from one side of the 78,000-seat Maracana Stadium to the other to the tune of “The Girl from Ipanema.”
Images of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, swirling in the Earth’s atmosphere were followed by projections of world cities and regions — Amsterdam, Florida, Shanghai, Dubai — being swamped by rising seas. The peace symbol, tweaked into the shape of a tree, was projected onto the floor of the Maracana Stadium that filled with thousands of athletes from 207 teams.
“The heat is melting the ice cap,” a voice intoned. “It’s disappearing very quickly.”
The crowd roared when Bundchen, the Brazilian supermodel and wife of New England Patriots quarter back Tom Brady, sashayed from one side of the 78,000-seat Maracana Stadium to the other as Tom Jobim’s grandson, Daniel, played his grandfather’s famous song about the Ipanema girl “tall and tan and young and lovely.”
Brazilian marathoner Vanderlei Cordeiro de Lima lit the cauldron to cap the ceremony.
After Brazil’s most famous athlete — soccer star Pele, said he will not appear, the Olympic mystery of who might light the cauldron had remained intact. The cauldron was designed by American sculptor Anthony Howe, who told The Associated Press he was inspired by life in the tropics. There are two cauldrons in Rio, one at the Maracana and another open to the public in downtown Rio.
In a video preceding the show, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the games “celebrate the best of humanity” and appealed for an Olympic truce by calling on “all warring parties to lay down their weapons” during the two weeks of sporting achievement.
The spreading health crisis of the mosquito-born Zika virus kept some athletes away. Promises to clean Rio’s filthy waters remained unfulfilled. The heavy bill for the games, at least $12 billion, made them unpopular with many. Heavily armed security stopped a small group of protesters from getting close to the stadium ahead of the ceremony, but that is not 100% sure. Zika virus, is everywhere, preventing it from hot weather and dirty areas, but during the ceremony believe so is over the top safty and fully protected.
