The London 2012 Paralympics logo. Photo credit: Pekha http://flic.kr/p/d8W1Eh
The background
The 2012 Paralympic games have ended after a spectacular ceremony in the Olympic stadium in London. Over a thousand acrobats and dancers performed to live music from the band Coldplay, Rihanna and Jay-Z, in what was described as “Festival of the Flame.” 4,200 Paralympic athletes attended the big bash in east London. The event drew to a close London’s unforgettable summer of Olympic and Paralympic sport.
The Olympic flame in London has now been extinguished and passed on to representatives from the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro where the next games will be held in 2016. Ellie Simmonds, who won four medals in the pool including two golds, and 100m T43/44 winner Jonnie Peacock were handed the honor of putting out the flame.
In his closing remarks to London 2012, Games chief Lord Coe said the last six weeks had banished the specter of the 7/7 terrorist attacks, which took place a day after the capital had been awarded the Games in 2005, quoting a doctor who worked in the aftermath of the bombings and then as a Games Maker volunteer: “I have seen the worst of mankind. Now I have seen the best of mankind.”
“In this country, we will never think of sport in the same way; we will never think of disability in the same way,” said Seb Coe.
Nation’s eccentricity celebrated again
At The Independent, Cahal Milmo described the “steam punk” closing ceremony as a “spectacular show that mixed superstars Coldplay, Jay-Z and Rihanna with a baroque – at times darkly surreal – parade of fire-belching contraptions, snowstorms and human fireflies.” The ceremony “followed in the footsteps of this summer’s other Games ceremonies by pursuing a theme based on the host nation’s eccentricity and eminence,” noted Milmo, who said, “some traditions were more avant garde than others … There would have been spluttering into cups of cocoa last night with the beatnik flavor of last night’s Mad Max neo-Pagan pageantry, demonic stilt walkers and the fact that a key prop designer – Mutoid Waste – were at the heart of the 1990s illegal rave movement.”
Emotional finale
Owen Gibson of The Guardian found the event to be “an emotional and fiery finale.” “In a Paralympics closing ceremony designed to act as a coda to a remarkable six weeks of sporting action, director Kim Gavin attempted to mix a surreal celebration of all that had been achieved with the melancholia of time passing,” noted Gibson. “The idiosyncracy that has marked all four ceremonies endured: the Earl of Wessex, Prince Edward, arrived along with International Paralympic Committee president Sir Philip Craven in a custom built machine that was a hybrid of a 1930s gangster car and an Afghanistan armoured vehicle.”
Gavin got it bang on (at the second time of asking)
At The Telegraph, Bernadette McNulty acknowledged that “saying farewell to this seemingly rare outbreak of communal, unbridled joy was certainly never going to be easy,” and sniped that the “dog’s dinner of the Olympic closing ceremony proved that.” McNulty said Gavin “returned for a second go at the pulling off the admittedly hard trick of combining all the pomp and speeches with something that combines the excitement of a rock concert with the emotion of a wake” and pretty much nailed it: “Nobody wanted the party to end but at least it went out in a riot of teared-filled jubilation, steered first by the imperious rapping of Jay Z and then a teary rendition of The Scientist by Coldplay and another glorious outburst of fireworks across the park. The most successful Paralympics ever thankfully got the rousing closing ceremony that it deserved.”
