Following years of lecturing by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that preparations for the Athens 2004 Summer Olympic Games were behind schedule, Friday night’s Opening Ceremony proved that the impossible can happen.
The three-hour Opening Ceremony had the more than 70,000 spectators in Athens Olympic Stadium glued to their seats and an estimated the four billion people around the world watching it on television glued to their television screens. Many others were glued to their computer screens.
The discussion forum on GamesBids.com was down for about seven hours Friday after it was overloaded with record numbers of people from around the world trying to get news about the Opening Ceremony.
Rob Livingstone, producer of GamesBids.com said, “site traffic from all over the world was way up, but that was especially true from the United States where many visitors were desperately looking for places to learn about the Opening Ceremonies live instead of waiting for the delayed broadcast on local networks. Until the forums crashed, some European members were providing a play-by-play description to the Americans of the event”.
The Greek newspaper Kathimerini rightly called the Opening Ceremony a pageant that “combines history with technology, earth with fire and water, presenting a modern eye on Greece through the Ages”.
According to the newspaper, “Athens welcomed the Olympics back to the city in which they were revived in 1896 last night with an opening ceremony that combined homage to the Greeks and their long march through the millennia with an enthusiastic welcome to the athletes of all the world’s nations competing in these Games”.
The Associated Press said that about 1,000 of the 10,500 Olympic athletes skipped Friday night’s Opening Ceremony because they were competing in the following days.
There were more than 4,000 volunteers and artists taking part in the performance.
Highlights of the ceremony included hundreds of drummers marching into the stadium, pounding to the rhythm of a heartbeat. The infield was flooded to symbolize Greece’s connection to the sea. A young boy on a paper replica sailed out into the arena. A centaur threw a lance symbolizing a comet into the water to light the five-ring Olympic symbol.
In one segment three giant statues representing different stages in Greek history broke apart and were pulled by wires high above the ground.
The ancient god of love, Eros, then flew above two lovers dancing and playing in the water.
Greek President Costis Stephanopoulos officially opened the Games.
When an announcer shouted the words “the great moment has come” the darkened sky was lit up with a barrage of fireworks and everyone knew the waiting was over. The Athens 2004 Summer Olympic Games had begun.
