Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El Sisi took part in the opening ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympics, which kicked off Friday.
Presidential Spokesman Ambassador Bassam Radi said President Sisi was invited by his Chinese counterpart to take part in this big sporting event, citing strong and strategic ties between the two countries.
Ambassador Radi added that President Sisi would hold summit talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss ways to strengthen bilateral relations, which have witnessed a qualitative leap in recent years at all levels.
It was a visually stunning opening ceremony in Beijing’s “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium early Friday. With temperatures appropriately below freezing in the Chinese capital, the ceremony began with an opening sequence focused on youth and spring.
The Olympics start on the fourth day of the Lunar New Year, China’s biggest holiday, which is also known as Spring Festival.
Instead, the focus was on a spectacular technology-driven visual show that featured fireworks and a light show before culminating with a block of ice that was “broken” by ice hockey players, giving way to five snow-white Olympic rings.
The Parade of Nations then took place, with athletes wearing masks alongside their winter coats.
The order of appearance was determined by stroke number in the first character of each country’s name in Chinese, with Turkey going second after Greece, which always enters first as the nation where the Olympics began.
Because China is the host country, its 176 athletes went last, entering the stadium to loud cheers and waves from Xi.
Though the ceremony began and ended with fireworks, there were only about 10 per cent as many as the last time Beijing hosted the Olympics in 2008, according to Reuters.
The Winter Olympics are far smaller than the summer edition, with about 90 countries attending the Beijing Games, compared with more than 200 that sent athletes to Tokyo last year. Many countries in Beijing are represented by a single athlete, including Albania, East Timor, Ghana, India, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan.
The artistic show had a seasonal theme throughout, with snowflakes representing each country coming together to form one giant, 3-D snowflake projected on the floor of the stadium – a high-definition LED screen that is among the largest in the world at almost 125,000 square feet.
The Olympics – and the opening ceremony – are always an exercise in performance for the host nation, a chance to showcase its culture, define its place in the world, flaunt its best side. That’s something China in particular has been consumed with for decades. But at this year’s Beijing Games, the gulf between performance and reality will be particularly jarring.
Fourteen years ago, a Beijing opening ceremony that featured massive pyrotechnic displays and thousands of card-flipping performers set a new standard of extravagance to start an Olympics that no host since has matched. It was a fitting start to an event often billed as China’s “coming out.”
