Winter Olympic Games Are Underway
With Japan's imposing Alps lining the horizon, the final Winter Olympics of the 20th century opened Saturday with somber sumo wrestlers casting away evil sprits and the strains of Beethoven reverberating from a cherry blossom-shaped stadium.
Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko, her hands covered in white mittens, applauded heartily as more than 2,400 athletes from 72 nations and regions - the most ever for a Winter Olympics - paraded past their box. The athletes will compete during the next two weeks in 14 sports in Nagano and the mountains that encircle it. Some nations, like the United States, have dozens of athletes; others like Iran and Belgium have only one.
They marched into the Minami Nagano Sports park triumphantly, each group led by an athlete carrying its national flag, each nation escorted by a Japanese sumo wrestling champion. Greece, the font of the games, marched first; host country Japan was last.
The 50,000-strong crowd's applause rose when the U.S. team marched in, wearing long slate-blue parkas and dark brimmed hats a good buffer for the 34-degree weather.
"It's just so exciting," figure skater Tara Lipinski said, smiling. "I hope I can remember it forever."
Appropriately, the opening of these 18th Winter Games blended the Asian classical with the global modern in a choreographed wish for peace and a flourish of tradition and technology. A 17th-century bell tolled at Nagano's Zenkoji Temple. Traditional Japanese music melted into an Andrew Lloyd Webber composition.
Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the International Olympic Committee, called on the nations participating to "observe the Olympic truce" and "foster international dialogue and diplomatic solutions to all conflicts, in an effort to bring human tragedies to an end."
Eishiro Saito, president of the Nagano Olympic Organizing Committee, said: "I sincerely hope that these games from the heart will achieve such splendid heights that they will ... be talked of for generations to come."
The emperor, the son of a man who for many symbolized Japan's 20th-century war machine, joined the call for an end to global conflict and pronounced the games open from his imperial box. Smiling, he gave the crowd a slight bow.
Yet if the Olympics are an insulated bubble, a reflection of how the world sees itself as the century wanes, events elsewhere hinted at a harsher reality. Amid Saturday's spectacle of celebration and unity lurked trepidation about terrorism at home and the threat of war a continent away.
Security was tightened around Nagano earlier this week after a terrorist attack on Tokyo's international airport. And in Washington, President Clinton mulled whether to use military force on Iraq an option Olympic organizers have implored him to avoid while the games are in session.
The opening ceremony's mix of nationalism and culture, ritual and faith, unfolded in an arena shaped like a cherry blossom, Japan's ational flower. It came 102 years after the first modern games, held in the Olympic cradle of Athens, drew just 245 athletes from 14 nations. The first Winter Games came 28 years later.
The famed Olympic flame, contained in a cauldron designed to resemble a traditional Japanese bonfire, was to be kindled by Japanese figure skater Midori Ito. Just how she would do so was one of the ceremony's most closely guarded secrets.
These games offered several other themes banning land mines, showcasing technology and espousing environmental responsibility, a notion that made some skeptical when, for example, a protected butterfly's grassy feeding ground was transplanted to make way for a ski run.
Japanese music wailed as eight two-ton wooden pillars brought down from the mountainous Suwa region of Nagano province rose, straddled by some Suwa locals and hoisted by others, to point skyward and purify the games. They formed gates for each arena entrance.
The parade of sumo wrestlers marched quietly onto the dais, chests bare in the winter air. Leading them: Akebono, Japan's grand sumo champion, or "yokozuna," who in his loincloth, without even a shiver performed a painstaking ritual designed to cast away evil spirits.
Children swarmed the stage, dancing in brown straw gowns to mystical music before casting off outer layers for white tunics within and becoming "yukinko," or snow children. They sang Lloyd Webber's song, "When Children Rule the World."
The technology shone as it showcased a work composed before electricity was harnessed "Ode to Joy" from the ninth symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven, who couldn't hear the music he wrote. On Saturday, 171 years after he died, hundreds of millions of people across the world heard it all at once.
A system tailored to eliminate the moments-long delay typical of conventional satellite transmissions allowed Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Seiji Ozawa to lead a real-time, cross-continental performance of choirs.
They sang from Berlin's Brandenburg Gate to Sydney's famed opera house, from the U.N. General Assembly Hall in New York to the gates of the Forbidden City in Beijing and the shores near Cape Town, South Africa.
It was a mix that never could have happened when the century began, when the vaunted concept of a "global village" connected continuously by wire, computer and radio wave was barely a vision.
At ceremony's end, just before five jets streaked crisply across the sky, dove-shaped balloons soared into the winter air, each carrying a message from a Nagano child.
Even the doves were tooled to fit not one, but two themes of this year's games. Foremost, of course, they signified peace.
They were also fully biodegradable.
Written by Ted Anthony Associated Press Writer
©1998 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed