Day 1 - Opening Ceremony

The opening ceremony aired at 6:30 am eastern time and was supposed to end at 9 am so I DVR'd it to watch later and guess what, it ran over time so now I'm watching it again on NBC on tape. NBC's taped coverage began at 8pm eastern time and runs until 11 pm eastern time,

The opening ceremony of Beijing 2022 began with a countdown from 24.. 24 is the Beijing 2022 winter games.. The 24th winter Olympiad. Also there are 24 cycles to the lunar calendar. In China, its the beginning of spring that the Chinese look forward to. 

In the next segment 400 performers holding LED sticks form spring willows, this signifies the coming of spring. Then the scene turns to a rushing river, the "River of China".

The next segment is a computer generated ice block made from 24 laser beams followed a roll call of 23 previous winter Olympic games. The Olympic rings rose from the ice block.

Next was the parade of nations. Greece was the first country to enter the stadium. The order of nations marching in the opening ceremony is determined by how many strokes in the first few letters of the Chinese alphabet. 

Japan has 124 athletes with 124.7 million population, Canada has 217 athletes with 37.9 million population, Finland has 96 athletes with a population of 5.6 million, ROC(Russian Olympic Committee) has 215 athletes with a population of 142.3 million population, Norway has 81 athletes with a population of 5.5 million, the USA has 224 athletes with a population of 335 million, the Czech Republic has 116 athletes with a population of 10.7 million, Austria has 106 athletes with a population of 8.9 million, Switzerland has 167 athletes with a population of 8.5 million, Sweden has 116 athletes with a population of 10.3 million, Germany has 149 athletes with a population of 79.9 million, Italy has 117 athletes with a population of 62.4 million and China has 173 athletes with a population of 1.4 billion.

The next segment is the snowflake of countries. This signifies the east and west coming together and or the coming together of nations. Then IOC Thomas Bach spoke opening the games followed by Chinese President Xi Jinping remarks followed by a segment called "Faster, Higher, Stronger, Together" and the raising of the Olympic flag and singing of the Olympic anthem

Next there was a Chinese snowflake segment showing young Chinese children singing and a video of Chinese children participating in winter sports.

The Olympic torch entered the stadium. 1950's born and 1980 Olympian speed skater Zhao Weichang handed the torch off to 1960's born speed skater Li Yan(1992 Olympics) who handed the torch off to 2 time Olympic medalist short track speed skater 1970's born Yang Yang who passed the torch off to 1980's born track and field Olympian Su Bingtian who then passed the torch off to 1990's born 3 time short track speed skater Zhou Yang who then passed the torch off to two 2022 Olympians, Dinigeer Yilamujan(Cross Country Skiing) and Zhao Jiawen(Nordic Combined). They both put the torch inside the snowflake to light it followed singing and then fireworks forming the Olympic rings ended NBC 's coverage.

The ceremony was very high tech, which I like, LED images of spring willows, mountains, valleys, photos and winter symbols on the floor of the stadium looked very real and lifelike. NBC's coverage was better than past Olympic opening ceremonies because the commercials were spaced out nicely and in the live version had the opening ceremony on the left side of the screen and the commercial on the right side of the screen with audio from the commercial being heard. NBC is finally getting their coverage right. NBC made several political statements tonight in their commentaries relating to China's human rights abuses, which was fine but I purposely did not include anything political on my blog coverage of the opening ceremony. Very well done Beijing 2022 Opening Ceremony and kudo's to NBC for their coverage improvement over past heavily edited Olympic opening ceremonies.

Photos credit: Getty Images, UPI and other media sources. For blog use only.