Opinion: Marathon, crowd-less Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony mixes in poignant moments
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TOKYO — The opening ceremony of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games was as utilitarian as expected, filled with small delegations of exuberant athletes from around the world entering a cavernous and crowd-less Olympic Stadium while waving earnestly to empty seats.
It went on for a very long time, with too many skits, and speeches that should have been shorter, but the fact that it happened at all was noteworthy. Postponed for a year due to the global pandemic, the Summer Olympics have officially begun. That’s a sentence many thought never would be written.
And for all the stops and starts of the postponement and Friday’s ceremony, it finished with a grand flourish, when Japanese tennis star Naomi Osaka appeared at the very end of the evening and lit the Olympic cauldron.