RIO DE JANEIRO: Brazil unfurled a vast canvas celebrating its rainforest and the creative energy of its wildly diverse population in welcoming the world on Friday to the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, all to the pounding beat of samba, bossa nova and funk.
Brazil’s interim President Michel Temer declared open the first Games ever in South America. But in a display of the deep political divisions plaguing Brazil, he was jeered by some in the crowd at the famed Maracana Stadium.
The opening ceremony was decidedly simple and low-tech, a reflection of Brazil’s tough economic times.
What it lacked in flash, Rio made up for with feeling.
“Our admiration is even greater because you managed this at a very difficult time in Brazilian history. We have always believed in you,” IOC President Thomas Bach said.
Brazilian singer Paulinho da Viola sang the national anthem with children to set off the show of laser lights and elaborate dances before the athletes’ parade.
In one of the world’s most unequal societies, the spectacle celebrated the culture of the favelas, the slums that hang vertiginously above the renowned beaches of Rio and ring the Maracana.
There was no glossing over history either: from the arrival of the Portuguese and their conquest of the indigenous populations to the use of African slave labour for 400 years. The clash of cultures, as the ceremony showed, is what makes Brazil the complex mosaic that it is.
Home to the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest, Brazil used the ceremony to call on the 3 billion people watching the opening of the world’s premiere sporting event to take care of the planet, plant seeds and protect the verdant land that Europeans found here five centuries ago.
Brazilian marathon runner Vanderlei Cordeiro de Lima, a bronze medallist in Athens in 2004, lit the Olympic cauldron, a small and low-emission model befitting the environmental theme of these Games.
The ceremony launches 17 days of sporting drama led by a cast of elite athletes including sprint king Usain Bolt and swimming superstar Michael Phelps which wraps up on August 21.