RIO DE JANEIRO—A love letter to Brazil and a rallying cry to save the planet from environmental destruction launched the Olympic Games here Friday as Rio de Janeiro sought to forget its troubles for a night with a glittering opening carnival.
The ingenious four-hour spectacular at the Maracana Stadium took 78,000 spectators and athletes on a dizzying journey spanning the dawn of creation to the birth of modern-day Brazil.
Indigenous tribes, dueling dance groups and an eye-catching appearance from supermodel Gisele Bundchen were among the highlights of a show unashamedly low on technology but high on invention, a symptom of economic constraints faced by the recession-hit nation.
But the overwhelming theme of the evening was protection of the environment.
“It is not enough to stop harming the planet, it is time to start healing it,” programme notes from the ceremony’s organizers read.
“This will be our Olympic message: Earthlings, let’s replant, let’s save the planet!”
An early opening sequence depicted the birth of life, culminating in the sprouting of a green entanglement of leaves from the stadium floor depicting the Amazon rainforest.
Indigenous Brazilians then performed native dances before creating huge “Ocas” or native huts in the center of the stage.
That gave way to an exuberant, joyous party which encompassed Brazil’s breathtakingly diverse musical and cultural traditions.
A memorable skit showed the rise of a metropolis, complete with roof-hopping parkour groups.
That was followed by a magical interlude paying tribute to beloved aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont, whose wicker 14 Bis “aircraft” then took the audience on a night-flight across a twinkling Rio cityscape.
Supermodel Gisele entered to the strains of the bossa nova classic “The Girl from Ipanema”, walking into the stadium to loud cheers.
A reported plan to feature a scene depicting the model being accosted by a street robber failed to materialize however.
Favelas and funk
A clever sequence depicting Rio’s favelas saw the stadium rocking to the mesmerising dance style of “Passinho”, as Samba and funk had the audience on their feet.
Yet the party mood was halted in its tracks by a somber sequence titled “After the Party” which used NASA scientific maps to warn of environmental crisis facing the planet, detailing rising sea levels to melting polar ice caps.
It culminated with Oscar-winning British actress Judi Dench and Brazilian thespian Fernanda Montenegro reading Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s classic poem “A Flor e a Nausea” (“The Flower and the Nausea”).
The gloomy tenor was lifted with a hopeful message, showing a boy captivated by the emergence of a seedling in a concrete jungle.
The theme continued as the parade of more than 10,000 athletes from 207 teams across the globe got under way.
Each athlete was presented with a seed and a cartridge of soil to enable them to plant a native tree of Brazil, which will ultimately form an “Athletes Forest” made up of 207 different species—one for each delegation.
With the completion of the athletes parade, mirrored towers were cleverly opened to create five green Olympic rings of lush vegetation, symbolizing what the forest will one day look like.
The innovative reforestation scheme comes, however, after the failure of one of the most talked about attempts to create an environmental legacy for Rio —cleaning up the city’s polluted Guanabara Bay.
Garbage, dead animals and human effluent continue to pollute the waters of the bay, into which the raw sewage of half the city is pumped daily.