The gigantic coming together of people from all corners of the globe in a peaceful celebration of sport is a phenomenon that knocks loudly on the heart.
Tremendous television and spectacle all-around.
Everything went off with a hitch until that fateful moment when the time to light the Olympic cauldron came.
Then things got weird.
As Wayne Gretzky and the other final torchbearers stood poised to spark it up, an awkward silence arose while the high-tech contraption suffered a malfunction.
The problem?
One of the four totems of the structure failed to rise from the floor. Gretzky & Co. nervously waited as the world watched before the call to make the best of it was made.
The man in charge of the ceremony said that his staff were investigating the cause of the malfunction.
“It’s a very complex piece of equipment. As you saw, it literally had to dance its place into its final position,” artistic director David Atkins told reporters.
“Unfortunately, the trap that revealed it from the floor of the stadium, which worked perfectly well at the beginning of the ceremony … with the totems rising from the floor, had some mechanical failure.”He put on a brave face, however, lauding his team for quickly finding a solution.
“It was an example of the fact that we’re all human, and the ceremony celebrated that fact in all sorts of ways, by virtue of the cauldron and the hand of God coming in to remind us that we have some sort of fallibility there,” he said.