Beijing Olympics opening ceremony vdeo revealed - Guy4game Scam? - Guy4game Coupon & Guy4game Banned

Jul 31, 2008

Beijing Olympics opening ceremony vdeo revealed

Beijing Olympics opening ceremony The biggest secret in world sport has been accidentally revealed after glimpses of next week's Beijing Olympics opening ceremony were leaked.
In a breach of China's fearsome security apparatus, a Korean television journalist was able to walk straight into the National Stadium - the Bird's Nest - and film long sections of a rehearsal.

The results were shown on his network, SBS, and the video was later put on the internet by News Limited, and Australian media group.

The video of a mock procession of athletes was followed by exquisitely choreographed dance routines, and powerful images of massed ranks of kung fu fighters dressed in white.

Games organisers gave no immediate response to the leak. Sun Weide, the chief Olympics spokesman, said he had only just been made aware of the broadcast and had nothing to say. "We hope to surprise the world with an excellent performance," he said.

But it was not the first sight the public had been given of what promises to be a spectacular display: there was no disguising the fireworks display that lit up the night sky of the Chinese capital last week during another rehearsal.

To the organisers, the opening ceremony is the single most important element of these Games, mixing an almost religious element of ritual with a demonstration of national culture that is supposed to restore China to its historic role as one of the world's leading civilisations.

The choice of director - Zhang Yimou, one of the country's best known film directors - has proved controversial. His films are often accused of pandering to the mass market and Western tastes at the expense of tradition, while the eight-minute segment he provided for the closing ceremony in Athens 2004 was criticised as tacky and over-sexualised.

However, determined to stun the world, organisers have imposed a complete black-out on images of the rehearsals. Those allowed in are searched, and made to sign contracts saying they will not describe the contents to anyone. Employees are reputed to have been threatened with jail sentences of up to seven years if they breach confidentiality.

"I totally have to keep what I see secret," said a Games volunteers who had won a lottery that enabled him to sit in on the third rehearsal underway last night. "I was so lucky - I was the only one of my groups of volunteers to come out of the draw."

Nevertheless, an SBS Korea employee was able to walk down from the international broadcasting centre and make his way into the stadium with a video camera.

The show starts with dancers performing a countdown, accompanied by a roll of drums. A huge scroll unravels, to reveal three dancers.

At various points, trapeze artists hover above the throng, while ethereal whales and animals are projected on to interior lip of the lattice-work steel stadium. In perhaps the most impressive footage, serried ranks of performers dressed in huge boxes rise and fall in what appears to be a visualisation of the continuous building of skyscraper blocks that is China's current cultural master-achievement.

The greatest attention the ceremony has had from abroad so far was when Steven Spielberg, the Hollywood director, pulled out as artistic adviser in protest at Chinese policy on Sudan and Darfur. Some foreign advisers remain, including Ric Birch, the Australian producer of the opening ceremonies at the Los Angeles, Barcelona and Sydney Olympics.

The excitement being generated by the Games in China, whatever the criticisms from abroad, were dramatically illustrated last night by the thousands of people pouring on to flyovers and pavements around the Bird's Nest for the latest rehearsal, just in the hope of seeing some of the fireworks.

Xu Haitong had brought his eight-year-old son all the way from Lanzhou, a city 1,000 miles away in China's west, so that he could be a part of history, however tenuous. "We didn't get any tickets for the events themselves," he said. "But for my boy this is a kind of education, about sport and about patriotism. He can see the country is powerful and strong again."

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