nu4m

Japan has an incredibly rich culture of tradition and technology - I highly doubt their ceremonies will be dull. They certainly wont need to bow to American tastes.

Plenty of spoilers here: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/sport/olympics/4480265/Games-finale-stars-the-Spice-Girlson-top-of-black-cabs.html

We all know that - but we are no discussing who invented a blue cloth for the stadium: the blue blue cloth made perfect sense for Auckland because they were telling the story of how their nation grew out of the sea, Athens and Barcelona used blue to represent the Mediterranean - but Atlanta used blue because........ ?!?! The only thing that comes close is the Mississippi segment, but the Mississippi is a brown narrow river , not an ocean. The blue cloth made no sense in Atlanta. I am from Sydney and worked for SOCOG between 1996-2000.

Hmm... Well only 19 out of 94 IOC members wanted the USA. to host the games in Chicago at the final vote. That says it all really.

Barcelona used the Blue cloth to represent the Mediterranean. Atlanta used the blue cloth because Barcelona did. Sydney used a sandy-to-black cloth to represent the ocean floor/desert/dry land. So no, Sydney did not copy either Barcelona or Atlanta, but it is clear Atlanta copied Barcelona.

The Atlanta opening ceremony was just an American version of Barcelona's. No new ideas, just bigger versions of the fantastic Barcelona ceremonies... Right down to the blue cloth on stadium floor . Atlanta copied Barcelona. I have spoken to many IOC members who were highly disappointed with Atlanta- and it was because of Atlanta that Chicago came last in the bid to host the 2016 games.