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Thank you very much for your company today. That is all from us today but there will be plenty more Paralympics coming your way.
Pyrotechnics all over the place now as the fireworks are flying through the air after being let off from the roof of the stadium.
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The Olympic flame is lit
The three torches have come together to bring us fire!
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The cauldron, you will be pleased to know, is hydrogen fuelled as the Tokyo Games aim to be carbon neutral.
Three Paralympians are making their way to the cauldron with flames attached to their wheelchairs.
The flame is on its way to be lit!
Our one-winged young heroine is about to take off from Para Airport thanks to all the help she has received from various people throughout the ceremony. “We have wings” comes the end message.
We are in the midst of a big musical number with musicians and dancers with varying impairments at the heart of it.
There is now a violinist with a mechanical arm playing, which is ruddy impressive.
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The flag is very much in situ now. A symbolic moment for all involved. The pledges are being read as we speak.
There is a saxophonist playing, so we really are at the business end of this ceremony.
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The Games are officially open!
The big news has been declared.
“The Paralympics is a platform for change ... but we need to do our bit everyday to be inclusive.”
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Andrew Parsons the president of the of the International Paralympic Committee is the next up to tell us how good sport is.
Japan Olympics minister Seiko Hashimoto is welcoming everyone to the event. I could type it all up but I am sure you get the gist.
The dignitaries have made their way to the stage.
An array of ‘planes’ are landing inside the stadium. There is a lot going on, I won’t lie. It is all incredibly upbeat, that is for sure.
We are working hard in the background here and already have a lovely gallery of photos from the opening ceremony.
Needless to say, the story of the plane is being told in the form of interpretive dance. A girl is in a wheelchair with one wing attached is landing at the airport.
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We are now being welcomed to Para Airport where we will hear a story of a one-winged plane.
The parading is over. Now we have a jazzy lights show. It looks all a bit Picasso and Goya at the moment, as paint brushes of colour are laid over the floor.
Take a look back at previous Paralympics ...
Japan have formed the largest-ever Paralympics team. It could take a while to get them all round the stadium. It is fantastic news for the nation to invest in this event so heavily and hopefully will have a long-term impact of sports in the country.
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Romania have arrived and now Luxembourg comes into the arena in some well-tailored blazers.
The feel-good factor for ParalympicsGB.
The Moldovan team have some traditional dress on. Our household has plenty of similar flowery shirts due to the Romanian heritage here, so I have plenty of respect for it. Moldova has a surprisingly big squad for such a small nation.
The Mexicans and their sombreros are in town. It is certainly a jazzy number that tops the head of a few of their athletes. Still seems an impractical piece of headwear.
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Madagascar have a flagbearer and no one behind here. What a proud moment for her to represent her nation at the Paralympics.
There is a strong Portuguese contingent entering the stadium. The largest we have seen for a while. It is always great to see a strong team supported by their nation.
Who to watch for the USA.
The US Virgin Islands are out looking very relaxed in summery outfits and carrying a bold eagle-based flag.
Very pleased Paul and I have reached friend status. The Faroe Islands are in the house in some snazzy jumpers. You have to admire that level of knitwear on the big stage.
That’s all from me from the opening ceremony in Tokyo. Thanks for your company.
I’m passing the baton over to my friend Will Unwin, who will lead you through the rest of the ceremony. Enjoy the Games.
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Looking forward to the action
The theme of the two Paralympic ceremonies is “Moving Forward”. With that in mind, let’s have a look at the schedule for the next 12 days.
Here’s what we have in store tomorrow:
Dame Sarah Storey could win GB’s first medal of the Games, and move to within one of swimmer Mike Kenny’s GB record of 16 Paralympic gold medals, in the C5 3,000m Individual Pursuit at the Velodrome, with qualifying scheduled for 11.10am (3.10am) and the final at 2.25pm (6.25am). Her teammate Crystal Lane-Wright should provide lively competition. In the pool, Australia’s Brenden Hall will be strong favourite to defend his S9 400m Freestyle title in the final at 5.10pm (9.10am). Ellie Robinson will look to add S6 50m freestyle gold to the 50m butterfly title she won at Rio 2016. Heats are at 10.33am (2.33am) and the final 6.47pm (10.47am).
A few of the teams have more female athletes than males.
Great Britain are not quite one of those teams, but there is a record number of female athletes among the 227-strong team. With 100 female athletes, the team will have a representation of 44%, a record for a summer Games and up from 40% at Rio 2016. Of the athletes named, 143 have competed at previous Games. They will compete in 19 of the 22 sports in Tokyo.
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines join the parade.
They are one of the countries making their debut at the Paralympics.
The New Zealand team has not attended the ceremony
Athletes from New Zealand are not taking part in the opening ceremony due to concerns about coronavirus. Spain, however, seem to have sent their entire delegation. They are in great form, laughing and enjoying the moment together.
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First athlete tests positive for Covid-19 in Olympic Stadium
While we have been enjoying the hope, colour and excitement at the Olympic Stadium, the news has broken that an athlete has tested positive for Covid-19 in the Paralympic village. My colleague Paul MacInnes has the story.
Ten British athletes to watch
As the athletes make their way around the stadium, let me draw your attention to a few of the unsung heroes in the Great Britain team. My colleague Simon Burnton has picked 10.
This is what Simon wrote about Jack Shephard, whose resilience is incredible.
Shephard is the world No 1 in his classification, having won the world title in 2017 – just five years after both legs were broken in two places in an attempt to straighten them, forcing him to spend nine months in a wheelchair – and again in 2019, success that sandwiched individual and doubles gold at the 2018 European championships. “It was quite brutal trying to get back to fitness, but I learned to accept the bad days and to use the bad days to come back stronger,” he says. “I look back on my experiences and I feel like I will be able to use them to give me the edge.” Britain’s four-person team for the badminton, which makes its Paralympic debut in Tokyo, also includes Dan Bethell, ranked world No 2 in the men’s SL3.
Some photos of the opening ceremony in 1964
As I mentioned earlier, Tokyo is the only city to have hosted the summer Paralympics twice. Here are a few photos of the opening ceremony and the action 57 years ago.
The stories behind the Australian Paralympians
My colleague Kieran Pender has spent time with some of the athletes, coaches and staff going for gold in Tokyo.
Australia go into these Games with high expectations. They topped the medal tally at the Sydney Games in 2000 and have finished in the top five at every subsequent Paralympics. Here are a few standout stories of their competitors in Tokyo. I was particularly taken by the story of Jaryd Clifford, who broke a world record by accident.
The 180 Australian athletes join the parade
If you’re reading this from Australia, you might want to read this:
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The Great Britain team enter the stadium
The swimmer Ellie Simmonds and archer John Stubbs carry the flags for Great Britain. They have been talking about the honour and thrill of being asked.
Simmonds, who has won eight Paralympic medals, including four golds, said:
I’m hugely honoured to carry the flag on behalf of all the athletes, support staff and for the entire nation back home. To go the Paralympic Games and be given the opportunity to do that is just amazing. This will be my first opening ceremony. Just to be here in Tokyo is amazing but to carry the flag is the icing on the cake and I can’t wait for the competition to start.
Stubbs, who won gold at Beijing 2008 and silver in Rio, said he was “incredibly emotional” to be asked:
It’s an absolute honour to be representing ParalympicsGB as flag bearer alongside Ellie. For any elite athlete to go to the Games and be bestowed this honour is a privilege. Words can’t describe what it means to me. It’s been a torrid year - unfortunately I lost my Dad in January. He was my biggest fan, and hopefully if he’s looking down on me, he’s there saying, “do it for the Stubbs family John, you’ve earned it and you deserve it”. I know my family will be as proud as punch.
The refugee team led out the parade
The refugee team opened the parade under the banner of the Paralympic symbols. There are six athletes in the team, including Parfait Hakizimana, who will compete in taekwondo – one of the new sports at the Paralympics in Tokyo.
Hakizimana has quite the backstory. The 33-year-old lives in the Mahama refugee camp in Rwanda, where he has been based since fleeing civil war in his native Burundi in 2015. After losing his arm at the age of eight, when he was shot during an attack in which his mother was killed, he later took up taekwondo and now competes internationally while also training around 150 refugee children living in the camp of around 60,000 people. Hakizimana, who will compete in the under-61kg category, has said: “Refugees don’t have a lot. But sport helps them forget their troubles.”
We’ve picked out a few of the global stars to watch in Tokyo:
There will also be some athletes missing from the Games.
Athletes from the Pacific Island nations of Samoa, Kiribati, Tonga and Vanuatu have been unable to travel due to coronavirus restrictions.
The two athletes representing Afghanistan, Zakia Khudadadi and Hossain Rasouli, have also been forced to withdraw after the collapse of the government and the return of the Taliban to power. However, their flag will be carried at the opening ceremony by a Games volunteer as a “mark of solidarity”.
North Korea pulled out of the Olympics and Paralympics a few months ago, citing concerns about coronavirus.
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The athletes are here
It is time for the parade – and we are going in the order of the Japanese alphabet.
There will be a few new faces at the Games this year. For the first time in history, Bhutan, Guyana, Maldives, Paraguay, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines have sent athletes to the Paralympics. Their flags will be paraded in the Olympic Stadium as part of the 162 delegations taking part. The Solomon Islands will be making their second appearance.
I’m a big fan of the Bhutan flag. (It’s not as good as the Seychelles flag but they have not sent any athletes to Tokyo.)
Now for some fun
The mood lifts and so does the tempo as volunteers in bright costumes dance their way through a colourful routine. It’s quite a sight. The performers are, apparently, invoking the Japanese tradition of karakuri.
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The flag is raised as the national anthem of Japan plays.
The tone has been one of quiet reflection so far, which is fitting given what we have been through over the last 18 months and given the situation in Japan at the moment – as my colleague Justin McCurry has been reporting this week:
There will be a sense of the familiar when the Paralympics begin on Tuesday. Senior Games officials, including the International Paralympic Committee president, Andrew Parsons, and a returning Thomas Bach will witness the start of the second instalment of the most controversial Games in recent history. In his role as honorary patron, Emperor Naruhito will declare the event officially open at a near-empty national stadium in Tokyo.
But less than a month after the delayed 2020 Olympics ended in sporting success for the home country and repeated claims by government and organisers that they had passed off “safely and securely”, the Japan preparing to greet 4,400 Paralympians will be very different from the one that reluctantly welcomed the Olympic family in late July.
Then the narrative centred on the unknown: the number of Covid-19 cases among athletes and support staff; the reliability of the biosecure bubble that would confine most visitors to accommodations and venues for the 17 days of sport; the willingness of the Japanese public to set aside their opposition and embrace the athletes; and, crucially, the potential for the Olympics to leave rising cases, stretched medical services and more weeks of emergency restrictions in their wake.
We know now that hundreds of Covid-19 cases directly related to the Games did occur, although they appear to have been confined to the Olympic bubble. Demonstrators in the heavily policed streets outside the main stadium and other venues rubbed shoulders with residents who simply wanted to be present at events they had helped pay for but were banned from watching. Visitors recounted acts of kindness they had been shown by local people.
Now we will have a welcome from the hosts.
The national flag of Japan is brought out to the middle of the stadium and we are invited to consider the last year. Sombre piano music plays in the background.
It’s a poignant, respectful moment. The empty seats in the stadium add to the sense of loss.
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The opening ceremony has begun!
And we’re off. There is a big countdown from 10 to one and the stadium is lit up with fireworks. It’s exactly what you would expect from an opening ceremony. Dancers, lights, noise and a brilliant mix of seriousness and silliness.
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The view from inside the Olympic Stadium.
The opening ceremony is just a few minutes away. Here are a few pics of the stadium as we get going in Tokyo. Not everyone is excited about the Games. There are protestors outside the venue.
Paralympics trivia
Inspired by Martin’s mention of dartchery, I’m wondering if anyone else has any great Paralympics trivia. If so, drop me an email to Paul.Campbell@theguardian.com.
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Our daily Paralympics email
If you didn’t sign up for Martin Belam’s daily Olympics email, you missed out. But all is not lost. He is back for the Paralympics.
Martin distills the big stories of the day into one handy email, which also serves as a preview to the next day’s action. You can sign up here.
His daily briefing always contains a great fact about the Games. Yesterday he had this gem:
Between 1960 and 1980, the Paralympic programme included a sport known as dartchery, where athletes in wheelchairs fired arrows at a target arranged like a dartboard from a distance of thirty metres, with the scoring working like a 301 game of darts.
Ade Adepitan, who won a bronze medal at the Paralympics in Athens in 2004, is presenting Channel 4’s coverage of the opening ceremony today. He also wrote for us this week about the excitement and pressure athletes feel before the Games begin. I thought this line summed it up perfectly: “The whole cycle of the Games is like getting in your car and driving at 100 miles an hour every day.”
There’s still something inside me that knows it’s a Games year. Even though I last competed at the 2004 Paralympics in Athens, it’s almost like my body has become attuned to being ready. You wake up and there’s this feeling: “Wow, I know something special is happening.” And that’s true even in this strange, fifth year of the cycle.
I have a sense of excitement as the Games approaches, but – fortunately – I don’t have any of the pressures; the pressures of qualifying for the Games and now of making sure you’re ready for them. It’s about this point in the buildup that athletes start to really worry. You’re trying to get your form right. But you’re also paranoid about getting injured, and about staying away from anyone who might have a cold. This year, of course, there is Covid to think of too. You catch that, you’re potentially out of the Games or even worse. I can’t imagine what it must be like getting ready for Tokyo right now, people must have wrapped themselves in cotton wool.
Coming out of the Olympics, one of the great things has been that athletes have finally been able to talk about the impact that these pressures have on their mental health. I don’t think the general public really understands that, the emotional turmoil that we feel. I think they love the idea that we are these indestructible beings who are able to cope with it all; do or die every four years. We go into the sport wanting to take that on, don’t get me wrong. We want to put ourselves in that position. But for us the whole cycle of the Games is like getting in your car and driving at 100 miles an hour every day.
How we reported the 1964 Paralympics in Tokyo.
This is not our first rodeo. The Guardian was at the Paralympic in Tokyo 57 years ago. On 4 November 1964 our reporter Jessica Young wrote about the various athletes taking part at the Paralympics in “Tokio”.
She spoke to Carole Tetley, a 21-year-old who had been a cycling champion until a crash left her paralysed from the waist. Tetley took up archery and table tennis instead and went on to represent her country at the Games. This is what Carole told our reporter: “I never thought I could get a thrill out of something as static as archery, but when I tried it I found I could do it. That was my first thrill. Now it’s fascinating just to sit there and go zing-zing-zing!”
We’ve dug up a few more of our reports from the 1964 event.
What we have in store over the next fortnight
My colleague Paul MacInnes, who is in Japan for the Games, has been writing about what we should expect from the Tokyo Paralympics.
“Any athlete you talk to, they have resilience,” said Shahrad Nasajpour during a press briefing in Tokyo on Monday. “Part of it comes from the athletic background, so any athlete you talk to they have it. But when you are a refugee athlete or Paralympian, which makes it even harder, the adversity behind makes you more perseverant in your life and in your career.”
Nasajpour, who has cerebral palsy, left his native Iran in 2015 and was granted asylum in the US. He was instrumental in setting up the Paralympic refugee team which competed for the first time in Rio in 2016, and indeed formed 50% of its number. Now, as part of a six-strong team, he will be competing in the F37 discus once again and when the Games get under way in Japan on Tuesday the resilience, perseverance and athletic talent that Nasajpour represents will be the qualities organisers hope to project to a watching world.
As with so much of Tokyo 2020, hope remains an operative word at the Paralympic Games. Covid case numbers continue to rise in both the capital and Japan more broadly, reaching record levels in the past week. There have been cases in the athletes’ village in recent days and four Pacific nations withdrew from competition after being unable to afford the quarantine in Australia en route.
There will be fewer spectators than at the Olympics, where fans were allowed to attend some venues outside Tokyo, though there are still plans to allow up to 140,000 schoolchildren to have access to events. The latest development is the suggestion that Paralympic venues could be transformed into emergency medical facilities once the Games have ended, a legacy very different from anything anticipated 18 months ago.
A few facts and figures about the next 13 days.
Tokyo is the first city to host two summer Paralympics, having also hosted the event in 1964 (the city also hosted the Winter Paralympics in 1998).
The Paralympics have transformed in the last 57 years. Back in 1964, there were 375 athletes from 21 nations competing in nine sports. This year there will be 4,500 athletes from 162 nations competing in 539 events across 22 sports.
Here are those 22 sports:
Archery
Athletics
Badminton
Boccia
Cycling
Equestrian
Five-a-side football
Goalball
Judo
Para-canoe
Para-triathlon
Powerlifting
Rowing
Shooting
Sitting volleyball
Swimming
Table tennis
Taekwondo
Wheelchair basketball
Wheelchair fencing
Wheelchair rugby
Wheelchair tennis
Badminton and taekwondo have been introduced this time around, replacing sailing and seven-a-side football.
The organisers have lofty ambitions – and why not.
“When people look back on the Tokyo 2020 Games in 50 or 100 years time, the Games should be seen to have been a catalyst for change in culture, society and values leading to the realisation of a more sustainable, spiritually richer, happier society.”
I’ll be very happy if I can remember anything at all in 100 years, but these events are special. I’ve been thinking about previous ceremonies today and one moment stands out for me. The song Caliban’s Dream, which was played at the opening ceremony to the Olympics in London in 2012. I have listened to it hundreds of times over the last nine years. It’s a stunning piece of work.
I’d love to hear about your memories of previous ceremonies – Olympics or Paralympics, opening or closing. Drop me an email at Paul.Campbell@theguardian.com or tweet me.
Here’s the song:
Preamble
So, are you ready for another fortnight of great sport?
That’s what we have in store, kicking off with the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games today in Tokyo. Over the next 13 days there will be 1,617 medals awarded across 539 events in 22 sports.
With around 1,500 athletes from 162 nations taking part, it will be worth watching. In fact, the International Paralympic Committee estimate that 4.25 billion people from 177 territories across the world will tune in for some of the action over the next 13 days.
It all starts with the opening ceremony today, which will be based around the theme of “We Have Wings”. The organisers say the idea is to raise awareness of the courage of Paralympians who are trying to spread their wings “no matter which way the wind blows”.
Incidentally, the concept for the closing ceremony on will be “Harmonious Cacophony”, which is about acknowledging diversity among people and transforming their differences into a shared unity.
The jargon doesn’t give that much away so we’ll just have to see what Tokyo has in store for us over the next few hours. The ceremony gets going at 8pm Tokyo time (which is 12pm in London, 9pm in Sydney, 7am in New York and 5pm somewhere).
