Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics opening ceremony: 11 key moments

Beijing again hosted an opening ceremony for the Olympics, and like the Summer Games in 2008, it was directed by Zhang Yimou. The event was on a much smaller and more muted scale than that memorable occasion – with 3,000 people taking part as opposed to 15,000. The motto, in a Games inevitably impacted by the Covid pandemic and mired with political controversy, was to be simple, safe and splendid.

Rather than having specifically recorded music for the athletes’ parade, it was accompanied by a selection of 19 well-known classical music excerpts which wouldn’t be out of place on Now That’s What I Call Classical Music. Organisers said it was to show the respect of the Chinese people to culture from around the world.

Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring would have been appropriate, as the season featured heavily as the opening theme. The lifecycle of the dandelion was represented by dancers carrying improbably tall and flexible glowing green stalks, which eventually turned white and were seen on video screen to be floating up into the sky as the seeds dispersed. Fireworks then wrote the word ‘spring’ in the sky above Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium.

Those of a certain vintage would have been reminded of the old Fox’s Glacier Mint adverts as a giant ice cube rose from the floor. This was the ceremony’s moment to acknowledge the Games that had come before, as lasers appeared to etch on its surface the names and dates of the 23 cities to previously host the Winter Games, going right back to Chamonix in 1924.

Olympic opening and closing ceremonies have, over the years, become a theatrical genre in their own right. They need to be designed to work for both the audience in the stadium and on television screens across the globe.

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