Tag: opening ceremony

Schooled (sort of)

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OK. Apparently, that wasn’t the Last Supper at the opening ceremony.

Except also, it clearly was:

The Paris 2024 organisers have apologised to Catholics and other Christian groups angered after a parody of Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous The Last Supper painting during the Olympics opening ceremony on Friday night.
A kitsch tableau parodied the iconic painting, recreating the biblical scene of Jesus Christ and his apostles sharing a last meal before crucifixion.

See?

However, this facebook post tells us (while dripping with condescending sarcasm):

It was not the Last Supper. It was a depiction of an ancient Greek Bacchanal.
Because, you know, the Olympics are ancient and Greek. Surprise!

Image link

But hang on. It was the Last Supper – the organisers foolishly apologised for that above – and Bacchanalia (the plural) were a ROMAN thing, not a Greek thing.
Bacchus was the Roman god of wine. He wasn’t Greek.

So actually, the Olympics are ancient and… er… Roman? No. Because that wasn’t a depiction of a Bacchanal. It was a depiction of the Last Supper with some added Dionysus.

Dionysian Mysteries are the Greek thing on which Bacchanalia were based: parties in honour of their god of wine-making: Dionysus.
Dionysus was also god of… just off the top of my head:

Orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre.

And yes – if you saw that bit of the opening ceremony – that does seem to fit the bill a little more accurately.

But if you’re going to write 500 words on how stupid people were to think that was the Last Supper (which it was), then at least get your facts straight. Because, as mentioned above:

The Bacchanalia were Roman festivals of Bacchus, the Greco-Roman god of wine, freedom, intoxication and ecstasy. They were based on the Greek Dionysia and the Dionysian Mysteries, and probably arrived in Rome c. 200 BC via the Greek colonies in southern Italy.

To be fair though, both Bacchus and Dionysus (I can’t speak for Jesus) regularly had their scrota (and often a lot more) hanging out when depicted in contemporary media.

So at least that bit was right.

The Opening Ceremony

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I mean, these things aren’t meant to be for the actual sports fans, are they?

I’d wager that literally less than 1% of the football fans in the Olympic Stadium in Berlin were bothered about the kids waving the special flags before the Euros final earlier in the month. And much like that wasn’t really part of the football, this wasn’t really part of the Olympic games.

Just an add-on.

It’s simply an excuse to dance and have lasers and play music and do… stuff.
And you’re never going to please all the people, all the time.

So why not just go wild?

Especially in France.

Accurate.

I actually thought it was quite fun. Really bizarre, but also really original. I loved the river vibe: why not break ties with the traditional stadium-based setup? It was courageous and different, and most of it worked.
The driving rain only added to the drama. And the religious iconography of that Last Supper scene [UPDATE: But actually, see here] was really quite something.

That said, the third hour of the horse running up the Seine was maybe a bit over the top.

Oh, and talking of over the top…

A moment that will stay forever with all of us that watched last night.
Despite many thousands of hours of therapy too, I’d guess.

Barney on that opening ceremony

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Herewith the comments of Barney Ronay, when asked about the World Cup opening ceremony – a few lines that made me laugh on the Guardian football podcast this morning:

These things are always atrocious, aren’t they? They’re a complete waste of time.
They featured the largest tarpaulin I’ve ever seen; the entire pitch covered in this thing that’s just going to be rolled up and thrown away. And of course, the wretched Pitbull. He was predictably terrible and pointless. Which was a bit of a shame because I quite liked the other bits, the walking trees and things, because Brazil’s quite a weird country and that was quite weird.

Quite.

And here, because I know you want my considered opinions on those three key refereeing decisions in the game that followed, are my considered opinions on those three key refereeing decisions in the game that followed:

  1. Neymar’s elbow: Deliberate (check how he looked at Modric before they clashed). An “orange card”: worse than yellow, could have easily been red. Referee bottled it.
  2. The Brazil penalty: If that was a penalty, everything else over the next month is also going to be a penalty. Player trips over tuft of grass on dodgy Manaus pitch: penalty. Captains shake hands before the game: penalty. I just tapped the space bar: penalty. Pathetic. Decision looked as dodgy as a Nigerian own-goal.
  3. The disallowed Croatian goal. Fair enough, I thought. The striker had his arm over the keeper’s shoulder as they jumped for the ball. It was a foul.

So, some flair, some controversy, some goals and a completely crap opening ceremony. Given that there won’t be any more opening ceremonies, I think we could be in for a cracker of a World Cup.

Beyond Pathetic

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Slightly belatedly, but still amusing in the extreme is this Time.com article: The Worst Ever Opening Ceremonies. As they state:

The goal is to put on a show that wows the world and doesn’t embarrass the host nation.
But that doesn’t always happen.

Please enjoy then:

  1. The 1988 Seoul Olympics, when they incinerated the doves of peace.
  2. The Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010, when a Canadian sporting legend was grounded.
  3. The infamous World Cup in 1994, when Diana Ross missed a penalty, despite having the world’s biggest goal to aim at.
    and:
  4. The lesser known 1991 World Student Games in er… Sheffield, where Helen Sharman, the UK’s first astronaut, fell over and dropped the torch, extinguishing the flame.

Fortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any readily available footage of that last one, which unlike London 2012’s efforts, really was beyond pathetic.

One World, One Dream

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Yesterday, I watched the Olympic Games opening ceremony along with 2,999,999,999 others. Not all in my lounge, obviously; that would have been a squash and a squeeze.
Anyway, it was fairly impressive stuff. Lots of flashy lights, a myriad of people running about in unison, a few people in weird costumes, some people attached to wires which made it look a bit like they were flying if you ignored the wires and so on. Oh, and some fireworks.


Attention!

So obviously very different from every other opening ceremony for a big sporting event. Right.

What was different about Beijing 2008’s opening night was the fact that it cost (according to the SABC’s coverage, anyway) about $75m (US) to stage. Which made me wonder how exactly it adhered to the One World, One Dream motto of this particular Olympiad. Kevin Mitchell sums it up nicely:

This opening of the 29th Olympic Games was an orchestrated marriage of superstition and military precision on a scale only a one-party state could deliver with such confidence. It was a show not so much riveting because of its artistic merit (which was considerable) but the self-conscious reaching for grandeur that has become the Olympic movement’s parodic symbol of excess.

And the official Beijing 2008 site states:

“One World One Dream” fully reflects the essence and the universal values of the Olympic spirit – Unity, Friendship, Progress, Harmony, Participation and Dream. It expresses the common wishes of people all over the world, inspired by the Olympic ideals, to strive for a bright future of Mankind.

While I’m all for the Olympics and their ideals – though I recognise that they are very rarely seen outside the couple of weeks of competition every four years – I would imagine that a large chunk of the world’s population would probably have different universal values. Like Food, Shelter, Housing and Safety, for example. Ironically, I would also guess that most of this group were the ones who weren’t able to watch yesterday.
This “Other World” doesn’t fit for the Beijing Olympics though; it’s ugly and awkward to deal with while they’re splashing out millions on fancy fireworks and Sarah Brightman. And so, like so much else, it is being swept under the carpet and conveniently ignored for the next two weeks.