Moscow puts on Games’ most dazzling opening yet

Press, 21 July 1980, Page 1

Moscow puts on Games’ most dazzling opening yet

From

GEOFFREY BAKER,

special correspondent, Moscow

Hollywood, eat your heart out. Saturday’s spectacular opening of the great Communist Olympics has posed an agonising challenge for the organisers of the 1984 Games at Los Angeles.

It is, simply, how to match the Russian effort which was, by ‘ common consent, the most impressive opening display in the history of the modern Olympics. The vast pageant plainly owed more to the Hollywood traditions of Cecil B. de Mille than to the Soviet ideology of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Set to music by Shostakovich and Beethoven, the Olympic opening featured a live audience of 110,000, a cast of 16,000 gymnasts, folk dancers, acrobats, and trampolinists, soldiers, ancient Greek horse-drawn waggons and racing Russian chariots. There were also burning incense, white doves, thousands of gas-filled balloons, and hundreds of children in little brown Olympic bear suits. But the unquestioned star of the show was the human pattern, a bank of : 3000 Red Army soldiers who sat in. a grandstand creating changing pictures and patterns with squares of coloured silk. Throughout the afternoon they ? created hundreds of pictures and patterns, some still, some moving, some shimmering. When the Soviet National Anthem was played, they formed the Hammer and Sickle. When the Greek procession entered, they formed a picture,, of the Acropolis. ■ - ■' Their finest moment came when they produced white wooden boards to form an instant pathway on their shoulders up to the base of the Olympic flames bowl. As they did so the captain of the U.S.S.R. basketball team, Sergie Beloff, aged 36, ran up the path to light the torch while the human pattern turned from white to blue behind him as he climbed higher. After the solemn Olympic flag-raising and formal opening by the Soviet Head of State, Mr Breznhev, who spoke from what looked like an open-front-ed concrete bunker, a 90minute display of gymnastics and folk-dancing got under way. In a grand finale thousands of gymnasts gradu-

ally formed a complex pattern of the five Olympic rings on the bright green, temporary synthetic surface of Lenin Stadium while forests of red flags sprouted from each corner of the field. Ironically, the rings were not interlocked and their separation reflected some of the political tensions which surfaced at the opening in spite of the memorable spectacle. The tensions were made manifest by Lord Killanin, the retiring president of the International Olympic Committee, who welcomed the athletes, “especially those who have shown their complete independence to travel to compete, in spite of many pressures placed on them.” “I ask you all to compete in the true spirit of mutual understanding above all differences of politics, religion, or race,” he said. The tensions were also apparent when 13 national contingents failed _ to take part in the opening parade. They simply had one official join the march, carrying an Olympic banner, behind. his country’s name-plate. Two countries — Spam and New Zealand — marched behind the flag of their national Olympic Committee. Eighty members of the 176-strong Australian team took part in the march. They were the only significant Western contingent to appear in numbers behind the Olympic flag. . At least five members of the marching group defied the team’s general manager, Mr Philip Coles, by producing, small Australian flags and waving them as they circled the ground. Missing from the march past were the usual big contingents from the United States, West Germany, and Japan, who • have led the boycott of the Games over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But present were many black African nations, client States of the Soviet Union, who were absent from the Montreal Games. The crowd in the stadium reserved its warmest

applause for the big Eastern contingents from East Germany, Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Cuba. Priding itself on sticking to the letter of the Olympic Charter’s prescription for the opening ceremony, the Soviet Union allowed itself only one break with Olympic tradition. The Olympic torch was carried into the ground by Victor Saneyev, aged 35, a triple gold medallist in the triple jump. He handed it on to Belof who made the long climb on the shoulders of the Army. A final, and mysterious message was flashed to the assembled athletes from the . giant electronic scoreboards at either end of the ground. It said: “Dreams are always with people Dare Olympiad be Dare live thunder.” Nobody was quite sure what it meant. Perhaps, these things lose every-' thing in translation.