Ceremony dazzles, but not for all

FITZ IN LONDON

Some sight ... fireworks ignite over the Olympic Stadium during the opening ceremony. Photo: Getty Images

It was a warm balmy evening in 1996, and I was walking to the opening ceremony of the Atlanta Olympic Games, John Huxley on my right, Peter Christopher on my left. The bus had dropped the Herald press contingent as close as it could get us, and we walked through a very poor neighbourhood to the brightly-lit stadium about a kilometre away. Out on the front porches of their houses, many families were gathered eating their dinner, and though they looked at us with mild curiosity, it was no more than that. And it was really rather shocking. Didn't they know that the opening ceremony of the Atlanta Olympic Games was about to get under way just an archer's arrow from where they were eating?

Yes, yes of course they did. But the intersecting point with their own lives was absolutely minimal beyond the fact that Spaceship Olympia had landed in their neighbourhood several years earlier, over their oft-bitter protest, and so they were just getting on with their lives.

On Friday evening last, it felt nigh exactly the same. The minibus drops us a good kilometre away in the heart of an impoverished neighbourhood bathed in the curious fluorescent light cast by a new version of the same spaceship - one that had landed in Stratford, East London, five years ago and has overlooked them since. Walking, walking, walking. Here, a couple of kids kicking a soccer ball along the footpath. There, a drunk lying in the doorway of an abandoned tenement. Right in front of us, a posse of youths pouring whiskey into a Coca-Cola bottle which they are then swigging from. This time, they barely look at us. They are not remotely aggressive, but it is simply like we aren't there. We have our lives and are heading to the spaceship, where the best of the seats are going for well over 3000 for four hours' entertainment. Many of them would not receive that in a year of welfare payments. So where is the connecting point?

Right there, in front of me.

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After walking 10 blocks, suddenly ahead the whole thing changes, from one side of the street to the other. Behind me lie booze shops, dark alleys, and mild urban decay. Ahead, just the other side of the pedestrian crossing, are bright lights, escalators, security men, and an entire sparkling Westfield shopping complex that we have to walk through to get into the stadium proper, a stadium that is the most sparkling sporting structure I have ever seen. As someone once wrote in these pages - and as a matter of fact it was me - ''sports stadia are the cathedrals of our age'', as serious cities try to outdo each other with the glory of what they have built. And in the London Olympic Stadium they have a Westminster Abbey for the 21st century, perfectly constructed to make 80,000 people feel they have an intimate connection with what is happening on the field before them.

And on this night, how splendid it is. The pomp! The pageantry! The music! And there is the British Queen, there is Michelle Obama, the London Symphony Orchestra, Rowan Atkinson, the finest athletes in the world, Sir Paul McCartney singing Hey Jude as we all bop along to the climax of this 27 million extravaganza, most of us with a sense of great privilege to be here. We are filled with the thrill of being at an event that hundreds of millions of people around the world are watching, and four hours later, we have real regret that it is over.

In our tens of thousands, we stream away as the lights behind slowly get dimmer, the security thinner, and then, suddenly, there it is again. That pedestrian crossing

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Ceremony dazzles, but not for all