Part pageant, part musical, part technological showcase: one thing any opening ceremony should never be is understated. Imagine being given an advertising slot with a reach of more than one billion viewers worldwide. If you’re the country hosting the Games, you’re going to want to put on some show. And we’re not talking a cursory plug of several minutes; these shows are expected to last over three hours.
Whether it’s the Olympics, the Commonwealth or the Asian Games, opening ceremonies have come to be one of the most eagerly anticipated parts of the whole two- or three-week sporting event. It’s the chance for the host country to show the rest of world how creative they are, how well-organised, how well-resourced – and of course, how well-financed.
Budgets for ceremonies are rarely bandied about, but Olympics generally have higher price tags. The Athens 2004 Olympics opening ceremony is thought to have cost over $100 million. Some reports say Beijing 2008 wants to match this figure, while others say money will be no object for the ceremonies.
That certainly seemed to be the ethos behind the ceremony most inspiring planners in China. The 15th Asian Games in Doha, in 2006, kicked off with what is widely agreed to be the most spectacular opening ceremony ever seen. With an unspecified budget, the three-and-a-half hour extravaganza played to 50,000 spectators and an estimated television audience of 1.7 billion.
Some 8000 performers from 20 countries told the story of the great regions of Asia, spanning historical eras, through the device of a boy’s journey along the Silk Roads, in search of a magical armillary sphere. Sixty-four horsemen, 2,300 children and 10,000 different costumes embellished the show.
Five years in the planning, the show culminated with Qatar’s Sheikh Muhammad bin Hamad Al-Thani riding a horse up a specially constructed steep flight of stairs to the top of the stadium. After shakily scaling the last rain-wet steps to the summit, the rider tipped his torch to light the 60-metre cauldron in the form of a giant astrolabe, triggering a massive firework display.
Such spectacles support an entire industry of construction and design. For Athens 2004, a miniature sea was created on the floor of the main Olympic Stadium as the centrepiece for a retracing of almost four millennia of Greek history, during four hours of performance.
More than 2,200 cubic metres of water filled the 9,500 square metre lake. It took six hours to fill and three minutes to drain! The specially designed underground reservoir had a capacity of 2.3 million litres of water. Fire fuelled by natural gas forced up through the lake water illuminated the five Olympic rings in the centre of the stadium.
With the generous funding they are thought to enjoy, planners at Beijing 2008 know its ceremony, a fiercely guarded secret, must equal or better these most recent displays.