Olympic Stadium, London - The Paralympics began not with a whimper, but with a big bang on Wednesday night. It began with the crunch of an apple and with a tribute to Stephen Hawking, the disabled scientist who has unravelled the mysteries of the universe and the big bang.
Each of the 60 000 people who attended the £8-million (R106m) opening ceremony on Wednesday night were given an apple as they entered the Olympic Stadium and were asked to bite into it at the same time, creating the “loudest apple crunch of all time”.
It was an extraordinary opening ceremony to a Games that promises to be extraordinary over the next 12 days.
From Oscar Pistorius to Graeme Smith – South Africans rule London this week. One is the fastest man on no legs the other a man who likes to play the ball on the leg side.
Pistorius is the face of the Paralympics and the go-to spokesman for the disabled. Smith is the talk of the town after Andrew Strauss, the England cricket captain, announced his retirement from all forms of the sport on Wednesday.
Strauss is the third England captain to have given up his job in Smith’s three tours to England.
On Sky News, they were calling Pistorius the “superstar” of Paralympic sport and when he led South Africa in as the flagbearer, the first time he has carried the flag in his three Paralympics, he received one of the biggest cheers of the evening.
The other cheers were reserved for Hawking, now 70, who was given two years to live when he was diagnosed in 1963 with motor neuron disease.
He narrated A Brief History of Time, which “brought meaning to each part of the show”. He was described as the most “famous disabled person”, although some might give that title to Pistorius.
Wednesday night’s opening ceremony, called Enlightenment, was a story of science, of how the mind can make the body overcome any disability.
About 3 000 volunteers, including 50 disabled performers who counted rehabilitating soldiers among their number, put on a circus act on a tall rig that was placed close to a mock Hadron Collider.
Former Paralympians “flew” into the stadium on golden wheelchairs. Other performers drifted in on a zip-wire from the Orbit tower outside the stadium.
And before it all began, Aerobility, a charity that enables the disabled to train to become pilots, performed a fly past.
It was a ceremony of joy and meaning.
The Star