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Crisis for 2010 planners after slick Beijing opening ceremony raises bar
JOHANNESBURG. South African football officials say they will have to rethink the planned opening ceremony of the 2010 World Cup after seeing the standard set by the opening of the Beijing Olympics on Friday. This morning worried planners conceded that their blueprints "may have been too heavily reliant on PJ Powers and helium-filled balloons shaped like footballs".
The Beijing extravaganza was watched by over 1.4 billion people, including 1.3 billion Chinese, as well as hundreds of Tibetan dissidents in Chinese prisons whose eyelids were stapled to their foreheads to allow them an uninterrupted view of the festivities.
International commentators have been effusive in their praise, with many Western media figures agreeing that the long rows of Chinese girls in short dresses and white go-go boots who lined the track had forced them to re-evaluate their opinion of China's human rights records.
However the ceremony came as a severe blow to the team tasked with organising the opening of the 2010 World Cup, who said that there would be "some tough weeks ahead, with a lot of difficult phone calls to a lot of disappointed mimes and beauty pageant runners-up who thought they were going to get their moment in the sun".
The tender for producing the opening ceremony was won in 2006 by Mzansi Empowerment Dynamos, a BEE-compliant company specialising in construction, catering, traditional medicines, textbook publishing, and human waste removal.
CEO Charity Mokwena, a hairdresser who moonlighted as a school inspector before being suspended to give her more time to pursue business interests in the pharmaceuticals- and undertaking industries, said that the Beijing spectacle had been "a shock".
"We were pretty sure it would be animal-themed, like the way we do it in South Africa," she said.
"We were absolutely certain they'd have some pandas, maybe led around the stadium on a chain, or on a balancing ball, and then maybe follow up with a big float celebrating Chinese food, like a 20-meter chunk of sweet-and-sour pork floating in the sky.
"That's how we would have done it."
But she said that the show, and its overwhelmingly positive response, had persuaded her that she and her team were on the wrong track with their designs.
"In a nutshell we were looking at about fifteen Zulu dancers doing the whole furry ankle-bracelet stomping thing, and then PJ Powers singing a ballad called 'My African Soul Swells Like A Soccer Ball Being Pumped Up', and then about a hundred little kids releasing balloons filled with helium, and then a kid in a wheelchair releasing a white dove."
She said that they were still trying to source a mechanised wheelchair that was impervious to dove-faeces.
"We did a test run and the bird crapped on the chair and short-circuited it.
"For some reason it pushed up the revs into the red, and locked the steering on full left turn.
"That poor little kid was basically doing donuts until she blacked out and fell off into some bushes."
She added that the new designs would "probably focus on animals, maybe with elephants playing soccer to symbolise something about something, maybe".
JOHANNESBURG. South African football officials say they will have to rethink the planned opening ceremony of the 2010 World Cup after seeing the standard set by the opening of the Beijing Olympics on Friday. This morning worried planners conceded that their blueprints "may have been too heavily reliant on PJ Powers and helium-filled balloons shaped like footballs".
The Beijing extravaganza was watched by over 1.4 billion people, including 1.3 billion Chinese, as well as hundreds of Tibetan dissidents in Chinese prisons whose eyelids were stapled to their foreheads to allow them an uninterrupted view of the festivities.
International commentators have been effusive in their praise, with many Western media figures agreeing that the long rows of Chinese girls in short dresses and white go-go boots who lined the track had forced them to re-evaluate their opinion of China's human rights records.
However the ceremony came as a severe blow to the team tasked with organising the opening of the 2010 World Cup, who said that there would be "some tough weeks ahead, with a lot of difficult phone calls to a lot of disappointed mimes and beauty pageant runners-up who thought they were going to get their moment in the sun".
The tender for producing the opening ceremony was won in 2006 by Mzansi Empowerment Dynamos, a BEE-compliant company specialising in construction, catering, traditional medicines, textbook publishing, and human waste removal.
CEO Charity Mokwena, a hairdresser who moonlighted as a school inspector before being suspended to give her more time to pursue business interests in the pharmaceuticals- and undertaking industries, said that the Beijing spectacle had been "a shock".
"We were pretty sure it would be animal-themed, like the way we do it in South Africa," she said.
"We were absolutely certain they'd have some pandas, maybe led around the stadium on a chain, or on a balancing ball, and then maybe follow up with a big float celebrating Chinese food, like a 20-meter chunk of sweet-and-sour pork floating in the sky.
"That's how we would have done it."
But she said that the show, and its overwhelmingly positive response, had persuaded her that she and her team were on the wrong track with their designs.
"In a nutshell we were looking at about fifteen Zulu dancers doing the whole furry ankle-bracelet stomping thing, and then PJ Powers singing a ballad called 'My African Soul Swells Like A Soccer Ball Being Pumped Up', and then about a hundred little kids releasing balloons filled with helium, and then a kid in a wheelchair releasing a white dove."
She said that they were still trying to source a mechanised wheelchair that was impervious to dove-faeces.
"We did a test run and the bird crapped on the chair and short-circuited it.
"For some reason it pushed up the revs into the red, and locked the steering on full left turn.
"That poor little kid was basically doing donuts until she blacked out and fell off into some bushes."
She added that the new designs would "probably focus on animals, maybe with elephants playing soccer to symbolise something about something, maybe".
