POSTED: August 8th 2008
NewsUpdate
Fireworks turn the focus to sport
KEIR RADNEDGE / Sports Features Communications
BEIJING, August 8: Logic dictates that the longer life goes on then the fewer opportunities present themselves to experience not merely the utterly new but the entirely dramatic.
As for life in general then so, surely, for professional life. But if truth is stranger than fiction then it is also superior to logic.
Thus, a fortunate 91,000 fans, officials and media sat high up in the humidity of the Bird's Nest to gaze down through a kaleidoscope of mixed minds on the unique opening to the 29th modern Olympiad.
Cynics and critics abound, as with every major sports event. Targets are easy: the money, personal self-aggrandisement and the power games - without even beginning to approach doping and such issues which corrupt the soul of competitive sport.
The 2008 Games came alive in a thematic maelstrom founded on the rights and wrongs of awarding the Games not to Beijing specifically but to China in particular.
Human rights is a properly sensitive arena. But then, no nation state stands without blemish in the eyes of other sectors of the political planet.
Politics and sport are interdependent forces. Politics exists in all public, professional and private lives. Take away a political framework, of whatever colour, depth or width and collapse is inevitable.
These Games are most definitely not the collapsible variety. China's industrial revolution can be spelled out easily in statistics but the Olympic Games offers the opportunity to translate that arithmetical alphabet into the emotional response demanded by mesmerically synchronised performers, the dancing torches in the crowd and the theatrical pyrotechnics.
Not forgetting, of course, the teams of 204 nations . . . and the torch.
Sport it wasn't. Nor pure theatre. So what was this extraganza whose thunderous fireworks exploded all the way out, above and beyond of the Bird's Nest and across the breadth of the Chinese capital?
After all, words such as celebration and party are hackneyed, overused and inappropriate.
Harmony was the theme, coupled with as much symbolism as possible: from the 2008 drummers to the 2008 depictions of children's faces.
Beyond the images this was, for China, a worldwide televisual demonstration, courtesy of a unifying, sporting stage, that it had joined the real world whether the world liked it or not.
For the IOC it was the crucial, and happily inevitable, watershed moment at every Games: the ceremony which marks the end of spiky distrust and the opening of a narrower focus on track and field, pool and pavilion.
For that is why the world stares in: for the sport rather than for the sideshow to which, after this explosively colourful night, China itself has been relegated.
How many know that the original winners' medals were silver not gold? How many know that the first woman champion was a British tennis player? How many know that all wars were halted before, during and after the original Games?
Not many can doubt that Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee and who spoke up generously and gratefully for the Olympic movement, remains fully cognisant of all the issues raised by the decision in 2001 in Moscow - of all places - to award these Games to Beijing.
Expectations that China would change overnight were, and remain, ridiculous. But the enforced opening-up to much of the world's media, coupled with its industrial engagement in a wider world, represent an irreversible force for a shift in the psyche of the nation.
Many years will pass before the deeper effect of bringing the Games here may be properly perceived, of course.
Such a hiatus will not suit critical observers who sat through the pageant in the stadium and thousands more who, maybe, did not even bother to watch on television, so entrenched are their opinions and prejudices.
At the least they missed a spectacle of pace, energy and state-of-the-art technical creativity. At most, they missed the point.
Keywords · beijing · bird's nest · rogge
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