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DAY 0: 27 July 2012/Friday

The zero hour was nigh, yet there was still actual athletic action to behold before the opening ceremonies of Peter Boyle’s whimsy commenced. The preliminary ranking rounds of both the individual and team competitions of men’s and women’s archery needed to be completed before the athletes paraded around the Olympic Stadium. The morning and afternoon sessions took Olympic fans to one of the spiritual homes of cricket, Lord’s Cricket Ground in northwest London, where the archers were set up to shoot.

The men drew their bowstrings in the morning, the women in the afternoon. Right off the bat fans were treated to a world-record performance, first new mark set at the 2012 Olympics before the flame even reached the stadium. With the Olympic calendar filled to the brim with a cornucopia of sports, the opening ceremonies have truly become a misnomer. That isn’t to say it is a worthless endeavor… there is still value in a tradition that bears some resemblance to the opening day of the ancient Olympiads, for whatever it may be worth. But it no longer signifies a true opening.

We’ve already looked at the soccer action of Wednesday and Thursday, so let’s move on to the hallowed lawns of Lord’s for the exploits of the modern-day Robin Hoods of the Olympics.

Men’s Archery — Ranking Rounds

The ranking rounds, with each archer shooting two rounds of 36 arrows, finished with the South Koreans in dominant position as they headed into the knockout bracket as a team ranked 1-2-3 in the individual standings. It positioned the Koreans for an unprecedented fourth straight men’s team gold, a run of dominance stretching from Sydney through the current century.

In the process, 26-year-old Im Dong-Hyun broke his own 72-arrow world record of 696 by three points in pacing the field. The legally-blind archer, who shoots without glasses despite having just 20 percent vision in his right eye and 10 percent vision in his left eye, put himself in position to become the first individual athlete to win three consecutive team archery gold medals. It was the third time he bettered the world record since the London 2012 archery test event at Lord’s on 10 October 2011.

Im’s teammate, Kim Bubmin, also broke the old world record with a score just one point off Im’s pace. He was followed by the third South Korean in the competition, Oh Jin-Hyek, who shot a 690 for the sweep of the top spots in the rankings. Britain’s Larry Godfrey finished fourth with a 680, and a two-way tie for fifth saw Japan’s Takaharu Furukawa and France’s Gael Prevost set the top score for their respective teams at 679.

World number-one ranked Brady Ellison of the United States was ranked 10th after the preliminary round with a 676, teammates Jacob Wukie and Jake Kaminski finishing near him in the top 20. The performance allowed the Americans to finish fourth as a team behind South Korea, the French trio of Prevost, Romain Girouille and Thomas Faucheron and China’s Dai Xiaoxiang, Xing Yu and Liu Zhaowu, giving the quartet of countries a bye as twelve teams advanced.

Japan, led by Furukawa, finished fifth and faced India in the first round of the knockout stage. Also advancing were Italy against Chinese Taipei, Mexico against Malaysia and Great Britain taking on the Ukraine.

Women’s Archery — Ranking Round

The women took to the grounds at Lord’s a few hours after the men finished, and once again it was the South Koreans who proved the class of the field. As a team the Korean women had never failed to win gold in seven previous Olympic team archery competitions. With Ki Bo-Bae and Lee Sung-Jin finishing 1-2 in the preliminary rankings, both shooting 671 (Ki with 13 bulls-eyes and 31 10s, Lee with 4 and 30), South Korea was the top seed in the rankings ahead of the knockout round. Teammate Choi Hyeonju was 21st with a 651 heading into the elimination stage.

Tan Ya-Ting of Chinese Taipei was also level on 671 points with Ki and Lee, hitting 8 bulls-eyes and 28 10s to rank third heading into the medal round. Along with the fifth-place showing of teammate Lin Chia-En, Chinese Taipei placed third in the ranking round, just three points behind the American team of fourth-ranked Khatuna Lorig, Miranda Leek and Jennifer Nichols. They placed two points ahead of Mexico, who claimed the last bye in the first knockout round with the combined 1974 of Mariana Avitia, Aida Roman and Alejandra Valencia, who all placed in the top 13.

Defending silver and bronze medalists China and Japan finished 7th and 5th in the preliminaries. China was due to face Italy in the octofinals, Japan scheduled against Ukraine. Also advancing were Russia against Great Britain and Denmark against India, the representation spanning three continents.

OPENING CEREMONIES

The opening ceremonies have become a showcase of pomp and circumstance, some hit and some miss. They have become the plaything of world-renowned directors, cinematic displays broadcast either live or tape-delayed — in the case of west-coast viewers in the United States, delayed over six hours after their actual start — for a worldwide audience of billions.

When Beijing seemed to set an improbably-high bar four years ago, the London organizers knew that they had something that simply couldn’t be matched. That Zhang Yimou showcase, employing 15,000 people in a $100 million extravaganza that stunned the world, was always going to leave whatever came next in the shadows.

But the Danny Boyle production, which covered the gamut from The Tempest to the NHS, giant parade-float versions of children’s book villains, James Bond and the Queen skydiving into the stadium and a slew of video features interspersed in with the live action, got London its money’s worth. For what is estimated to be somewhere between a quarter and half the budget of Beijing, Boyle pulled off a showcase that lived up to the modern tradition that has become the traditional opener of the Olympic festivities. Finally the Olympic flame entered the stadium; finally the athletes — those who didn’t have to sleep for competition the next day, at least — were able to don the assorted accouterments selected by their national federations and parade around the stadium behind their flags.

There proved a healthy global debate about the moment of silence for the slain Israeli Olympians of 1972 that IOC president Jacques Rogge would not assent to inserting in the opening ceremonies. With an unprecedented amount of access and interconnectedness through the internet and its social-media platforms, Olympic fans around the world were able to express their views in a way that kept alive the memory of those athletes four decades after their murders in Munich.

Should the IOC have acted? Perhaps, though at the same time it ought to equally be the prerogative of the organizers to make such decisions. A minute seems like an insignificant thing to debate in this situation, something no doubt worthwhile in the grand scheme of things and a mere sixty seconds. But in a world dominated by the timing of television, and in a program that already saw a half hour cut from its original script, a minute is not as insignificant as it originally seems.

Could the IOC have imposed its demands on Boyle and the London organizers? Should they have, say, bought commercial time from every one of their network broadcasters worldwide for a simultaneous moment of silence? The problem is that there is neither a clear-cut answer nor a consensus on whether the gesture should have taken place at the opening ceremonies. But considering Boyle made subtle references to suffrage and censorship and protest throughout his three-hour show, it seems that it would not have been too out of place.

Regardless, the opening ceremony was exactly as expected — where Zhang Yimou’s Beijing ceremony was evocative of modern Chinese cinematography, with its masses of people in perfect formation and its flying spectacles and all of its pageantry, Boyle’s show in London was understated and more like an independent film jabbing through to the psyche without beating any one message overhead.

And then the athletes paraded, finally, the slow processional pressing against the time limit. The Greeks entered first, the British team last, and in between the line of nations marched one by one in alphabetical order. Along with the Indian contingent marched one interloper, a graduate student from the southern city of Bangalore named Madhura Nagendra who had been living in London. Nagendra who failed to dress the part yet passed through to the field somehow to get in line with her Indian compatriots.

The torch entered the stadium, and the flame came to life. Paul McCartney stirred the crowd with an encore-like performance. The Olympics lived on into another quadrennial, finally commenced officially after two and a half days of competition had already been completed. The quintessentially quirky celebration of British culture fit perfectly with the off-kilter scheduling of the Games themselves.