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And the Beijing Olympic Games Kicked off

Posted by mcdamas in August 10th, 2008

Friday, August 8, 2008 was chosen by Chinese to kick off the biggest world sport event, Olympic Game. So China celebrated its first-time role as Olympic host with a stunning display of pageantry and pyrotechnics to open a Summer Games. China welcomed scores of world leaders to an opening ceremony watched by 91,000 people at the eye-catching National Stadium and a potential audience of 4 billion worldwide. It was said to be the largest, costliest extravaganza in Olympic history, displaying some 30,000 fireworks.

As the sparkling explosions chased one after another, the crowd counted down the final seconds before the show began. A thousand of drummers - 2,008 in all - hit the drums rhythmically with their hands as acrobats on wires gently wafted down into the stadium and rockets shot up into the night sky from its rim.

Among the notable guests attending the opening ceremony were President Bush and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Bush, rebuked by China after he raised human-rights concerns this week, is the first U.S. president to attend an Olympics on foreign soil. China as it develops rapidly economically is given a good chance of overtaking the U.S. atop the gold-medal standings with its legions of athletes trained intensely since childhood. One dramatic showdown will be in women’s gymnastics, where the U.S. and Chinese teams are co-favorites; in the pool, Chinese divers and U.S. swimmers are expected to dominate.

China has invested $40 billion to build the needed infrastructure, reeling from a catastrophic earthquake in Sichuan province in May, struggling right up to Friday to diminish Beijing’s stubborn smog. However, China’s detentions of political activists, its crackdown on uprisings in Tibet and its economic ties to Sudan - home of the war-torn Darfur region - fueled relentless criticisms from human rights groups and calls for an Olympic boycott. The games, said IOC President Jacques Rogge, are a chance for the rest of the world to discover what China the homeland of 1.3 billion peoplereally is.

The story presented in Friday’s ceremony sought to distill 5,000 years of Chinese history - featuring everything from the Great Wall to opera puppets to astronauts, and highlighting achievements in art, music and science. Roughly 15,000 people were in the cast, all under the direction of Zhang Yimou, whose early films often ran afoul of government censors for their blunt portrayals of China’s problems.

The show’s script steered clear of modern politics without any reference to Chairman Mao and the class struggle, nor to the more recent conflicts and controversies. The ceremony was taped for broadcast 12 hours later in the United States.

A record 204 delegations were set to parade their athletes through the stadium - superstars such as basketball idols Kobe Bryant and Yao Ming, as well as plucky underdogs from Iraq, Afghanistan and other embattled lands. The nations were marching not in the traditional alphabetical order but in a sequence based on the number of strokes it takes to write their names in Chinese. The exceptions were Greece, birthplace of the Olympics, which was given its traditional place at the start, and the 639-member Chinese team, which lined up last.

The American flag-bearer was 1500-meter runner Lopez Lomong, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, who spent a decade of his youth in a refugee camp in Kenya. He’s a member of the Team Darfur coalition, representing athletes opposed to China’s support for Sudan. On Friday he avoided any criticism and said the Chinese “have been great putting all these things together.

Human rights activist, Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch, commented that the Chinese government and the International Olympic Committee have wasted a historic opportunity to use the Beijing Games to make real progress on human rights in China. On the other hand, for Chinese dissidents who have dared to challenge the Communist Party’s monopoly on power, the start of the Olympics meant tighter surveillance and restrictions.

By all indications, however, most Chinese have embraced the games, buying up tickets at a record pace, volunteering by the thousands for Olympic duties, nursing expectations of triumphs by their home team. To their eyes, the omens were good. The ceremony began at 8 p.m. on the eighth day of the eighth month of 2008 - auspicious in a country where eight is the luckiest number. “It not easy to meet with such a date,” said Wang Wei, secretary general of Beijing Organizing Committee. “Hopefully this lucky day will bring luck.”