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Memorable images from the Opening Ceremonies of the Games of the 28th Olympiad.
The Good...
The Opening Ceremony blew everybody away. Not literally, thank God.
The mostly hometown crowd welcomed the US Olympic team warmly during the parade of the athletes, despite fears that the Americans would be jeered because of the highly unpopular Iraq war. The Iraqi, Afghani and Cypriot teams also received standing ovations.
The Bad...
The Kenteris and Thanou controversy exploded in the early morning hours of Friday. The two Greek sprint superstars were involved in a motorcycle accident, allegedly on their way back to the Olympic Village, after failing to appear for an obligatory drug test. The country held its collective breath as its two top medal contenders were mired in controversy. By the end of the day, most Greek media and pundits had turned against the duo and their coach, and some were calling them liars and deceivers.
A Beijing People's Daily Chinese cameraman collapsed and died of heart failure in downtown Athens, on Friday morning, while filming the Torch Relay. He was 47.
And the Weird...
The New York Times report on the Opening Ceremony, filed by Susan Sachs from Athens. Out of a total of 1,539 words, 1,041 words, or a little more than two thirds of the story, were about security (877 words) and the Kenteris controversy (164 words). Even the recent arrests of al Qaeda members in Pakistan found their way into the story. An uninformed reader would probably come away thinking that they just read a story about American athletes parading under heavy security, somewhere, for no apparent reason, with helicopters and NATO AWACS planes flying overhead...
nyloo's daily Olympic Diary
The Games opened on Friday night, in grand fashion. Most of you saw the opening ceremony on television, since the worldwide television audience was estimated at four billion.
As one Greek artist observed on TV after the ceremony, "most other opening ceremonies, in previous Games, were great historical retrospectives of the host countries' history, but they were basically folkloric in nature. This one was poetic".
And it was. Poetic, in good taste, high tech, and full of symbolism, while embracing a wider cultural universe, as evidenced by the presence of Icelandic pop diva Bjork and Dutch superstar club DJ Tiesto.
Reactions ranged from positive to raving.
In typical Italian lyrical fashion, the top Italian sports daily newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport raved: "Marvellous. In an era of mediocre television, Greece presented the gift, to 74 thousand lucky spectators and to billions of television viewers worldwide, of the return of pure spectacle, made of images and colors, symbols and sounds. A magical introduction to the 2004 Olympics, ambrosia for the eyes, the soul and the heart."
According to CNN.com, "the Olympic Games returned to their birthplace in Greece on Friday, after 108 years, with a glittering ceremony set to put to memory thoughts of construction delays and doping scandals."
The Los Angeles Times noted: "With five rings ablaze in the middle of a manmade sea, the Olympics returned to its birthplace Friday in an epic homecoming heralded by a pounding heartbeat, a mythological centaur and an array of Greek gods followed by the biggest parade of nations in the games' history."
Tomorrow is the first full day of actual sports, with the attention of the world turning to the Olympic Aquatic Center for Act 1 of the Thorpe-Phelps show.
