South Korea marked the end of the 2018 Winter Olympics with a spectacular closing ceremony in Pyeongchang. All the usual elements were there – the costumes, the fireworks, and the ceremonial handover to the next hosts. With an overarching theme of winter turning into spring, the two-hour show had some amazing highlights.
A real-life guitar hero
One of the first musical numbers featured 13-year-old guitarist Yang Tae-hwan, who did a metal-inspired guitar version of excerpts from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.
But it was the gravity-defying dancers in the background that grabbed the attention in this sequence. Standing on top of some squiggly lines that seemed to represent the frequencies of the music, they looked like a real-life version of Guitar Hero.
‘A proper hangover cure, that one’
In the UK, where the ceremony started at 11am on a Sunday morning, the BBC’s commentary team were not over-impressed by the appearance of South Korean post-rock band Jambinai. They mix classical South Korean instruments with guitar, drums and bass, and end up sounding something like Mogwai or Explosions in the Sky.
Athletes with conspicuous selfie sticks
The organisers of the closing ceremony changed Olympic etiquette slightly for the athletes’ entrance. Usually, at the closing ceremony they come in as one big happy bunch, but this year they were still marshalled into different teams and countries. But there was no missing the selfie sticks. At least at the Winter Olympics you imagine they could be used for some impromptu ice hockey.
The bit where it paused for a medal ceremony
The women’s 30km mass-start classic cross-country skiing event had its medal presentation in the middle of the ceremony. And that meant that the most successful Winter Olympian of all time, Norway’s Marit Bjørgen, was presented with her eighth gold – and 15th medal overall – in front of the largest possible television audience. It seemed very, very fitting.
Accent on youth
As well as the overall theme of winter turning to spring, there was a real emphasis on youth during the ceremony, whether it was the 13-year-old guitarist or two small children holding snow globes. They were both born on the day in July 2011 when Pyeongchang learned it would host the Games.
The singing of the Olympic anthem was entrusted to an 11-year-old boy, Oh Yeon-joon, who had won the South Korean version of The Voice.
And neatly tying the the closing ceremony to the opening ceremony, the five children who had been the focus two weeks ago made another appearance.
He did it again
Of course he did. Tonga’s Pita Taufatofua once again went topless for the closing ceremony.
That awkward diplomatic seating plan
Ivanka Trump was representing the US in the audience – her father having tweeted that “we cannot have a better, or smarter, person representing our country” on Friday. Rather like the situation with Mike Pence at the opening ceremony, Ivanka found herself seated close to a controversial figure from the North Korean regime.
Kim Yong-chol has been blamed for the sinking of a South Korean naval ship that killed 46 sailors. The 72-year-old previously headed up the Reconnaissance General Bureau – North Korea’s spy agency.
The handover from South Korea to China
There’s always something historic about the handover of the Olympic flag from host city to host city, and so it was with the flag passing from Pyeongchang to Beijing – not just for geopolitical reasons. With Tokyo hosting the summer games in 2020, it represents six years that the Olympics will be centred in east Asia. Beijing will also become the first city ever to have hosted both the Summer and Winter Olympics.
China’s amazing glowing inline skating pandas
Beijing got to contribute its own section to the show – and it started with some astonishing lit-up see-through inline skating pandas. Top that.
It was all about EXO
K-pop band EXO’s fans have been dominating social media in the buildup to the closing ceremony. Within minutes of the ceremony starting they managed to get #Olympics_EXO to be the number one trending Twitter hashtag worldwide.
The eight-piece boyband performed their huge hit Power, accompanied by a massive fireworks display, after entering the arena on individual trucks.
