The drumbeat came first from ancient Olympia, its drummer appearing on the video screens at each end of the breathtakingly beautiful 2004 Olympic Stadium.
The drum’s rhythm pulsated like the heartbeat of the Olympic Games born under the hill of Cronos nearly three millennia ago. It was a call across time.
The call was answered by a live drummer in the Olympic Stadium. In its antiphonal response, the drum was affirming that the sounds of antiquity still resonate in the 21st Century.
So it was that Greece reminded itself and the world of the idea that the Olympics are not just an event but a heritage worth passing on, even at the cost of perhaps $11 billion and the effort of mounting a security operation of unprecedented proportions for a sporting, cultural or political event.
The Olympic Games opened Friday night in a ceremony where wordless symbolism took center stage over the entertainment extravaganzas that had marked the openings of recent Summer Games.
Greece has vowed to bring a human scale back to the exaggerated proportions the Olympics have assumed. The spareness of the spectacle that preceded the parade of the athletes emphasized that these young men and women are the measure of all things Olympic.
“Athletes of the world,” said Athens Olympic Organizing Committee President Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, wearing a sleeveless dress as white as the robes of the priestesses who first light the Olympic flame, “you are the true and worthy heirs of Koroibos, the first Olympic champion 3,000 years ago.
“Now you will be Olympians where it all began. And you are at the center of our Games.”
Greeks were the alpha and omega of the athletes’ parade. That follows a tradition in which Greece’s role as the birthplace of the ancient and modern Olympics is recognized by having Greece always march in first, while the host country comes in last.
For Greeks, the problem Friday was trying to find a middle emotional ground between the joy of an Olympic homecoming after 108 years and the gloom surrounding two of their most famous athletes, who spent the day in a hospital instead of the Olympic Stadium.
Reigning Olympic 200-meter champion Kostas Kenteris and European 100-meter champion Katerina Thanou have become part of a soap operatic spectacle involving failure to show up for doping controls, a reported motorcycle accident and potential banishment from the Games.
As rumors abounded in a nation fixated on the story, the only sure thing was that the two runners must go before an International Olympic Committee disciplinary hearing Monday if they hope to compete.
Watching the Olympic torch travel up Kifisias Avenue toward the stadium, where Greek Olympic wind surfing champion Nikolaos Kaklamanakis lit the flame that will burn until the Games end Aug. 29, former Greek track star Katerina Koffa said the controversy tempered her enjoyment.
“Instead of being happy about the opening ceremony, everybody is riled up,” said Koffa, world indoor champion at 200 meters in 1997. “The atmosphere has soured.”
The ceremony atmosphere mixed the solemn and the lighthearted.
To open the festivities for the 72,000 spectators, five men in hard hats acted out hammering nails on the floor of the stadium, poking fun at how getting Athens ready for the Olympics had gone down to the last minute. A video that resembled a Syrtaki dance, speeding up as it went along, compressed seven years of massive building projects into a few seconds. Before the formal part of the ceremony began, a lone worker appeared to hammer a final nail.
For nearly 18 minutes after the recitation of a poem, not a word was spoken as performers presented the evolution of Greek civilization and human consciousness followed by 4,000 years of Greek history, from the Minoans to the 1896 revival of the Olympics in Athens. Notably missing from the cultural and historical diorama that encircled the stadium floor were the nearly 400 years of Turkish rule, forever an open sore in the Greek psyche.
It took 11 minutes to cover 4,000 years and two hours for the athletes from a record 202 nations to enter the stadium.
First came Pyros Dimas, the three-time Olympic weightlifting champion, alone with the Greek flag, which he would bear again to lead his teammates at the end of the parade.
And then the saints came marching in. In a parade order determined by the Greek alphabet, where the word for saint is Agios, the Caribbean island of St. Lucia was at the head of the “A” list.
The United States team entered 56th, its appearance greeted by a roar mixed with derisive whistles not heard again until the Turkish team appeared.
Since most Greeks are hostile toward the U.S. government, the U.S. Olympians had orders to be on their best behavior, and they complied.
While other teams carried numerous flags small and large and mugged for the cameras, the U.S. athletes were a decorous group bereft of any flags other than the one borne by basketball player Dawn Staley.
Even the NBA players at the end of the massive U.S. throng limited their extraneous movement to a few waves and Tim Duncan’s fiddling with his video camera. But the points won for good conduct could not overcome the fashion misstatement that passed for U.S. men’s apparel, a combination that looked like a blue sweat suit over a red shirt.
For the second straight Olympics, North and South Korea carried one flag, although the arrangement this time was a bit peculiar.
Because the North had no athlete as tall as 5-foot-11-inch South Korean volleyball player Ku Ming Jin, it had team official Kim Song Ho share carrying the flag rather than be overshadowed.
China’s Yao Ming stood tallest of all the flagbearers. Canada’s athletes were the most creative, with some adding laurel wreaths to their caps. Paraguay’s made the only political statement, carrying a sign that said, “No more horror. Hope. Up with Paraguay.” Burundians dressed in mock tiger skins marched to native dance steps. The Iraqis received an especially large ovation when they entered the stadium, as did the Palestinians.
Throughout the ceremony, one thing was clear: All the trouble to assemble the roof designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava was worth it. Not only was it a stunning architectural triumph, but its arches and trusses supported many of the wires that allowed pieces of the theatrical set as well as performers to float above the stadium floor.
The only discordant note–or notes–to the mood sprang from the mouth of the Icelandic singer Bjork, who appeared in a dress not unlike the confection that became the butt of 1,000 jokes when she wore it to perform at an Academy Awards.
Four hours after the stagecraft paid homage to the geometers, mathematicians and physicists of ancient Greece, their genius melded with modern technology and Calatrava’s fancy to produce a dramatic lighting of the Olympic stadium flame.
The torch had, for the first time, been carried to five continents before coming back to Greece. As Kaklamanakis carried the flame down the middle of the stadium floor and up a staircase, the video board at one end had swung to a nearly flat position. At the same time, what first looked like a pencil-shaped structure lowered to a point just above Kaklamanakis, and he touched his flaming torch to its tip.
The burning end wound up at the top as the pencil took on the appearance of an olive leaf topped by a torch. To the Greeks, the olive is the tree of life. Ancient Olympic victors received wreaths of olive leaves.
“In one day,” Angelopoulos-Daskalaki said, her sentiment better than her math, “the Olympic flame has traveled 3,000 years of our history, from the Acropolis to this modern stadium.”
The floor of the stadium was covered with water during the first part of the evening. The choice of a sailor to light the stadium linked 2,780 years of the Olympics to the eternal role of the sea in Greek life. It was a call across timelessness.
