LONDON— London has bid farewell to the 2012 Olympic Games with a blazing tribute to 50 years of British music and culture.
The scene opened to a street party centered on a giant Union Jack representing the streets of London with prominent city landmarks like the London Eye.
Various performances helped warm up the show, including Madness singing “Our House,” the Queen’s Coldstream Guards marching to the tune of Blur’s “Park Life,” and ex-Kinks rock star Ray Davies singing “Waterloo Sunset.”
“We showed the best of British music tonight, we really did,” said Suzanne Turvey, a performer in the opening ceremony who watched the closing ceremony from a big screen outside Olympic Park. After reuniting with other opening ceremony performers, Turvey was on her way to “do karaoke and sing more Spice Girls.”
The Spice Girls were the most popular performers for audience members The Epoch Times interviewed leaving the park.
Multicolored London cabs brought in the Spice Girls who sang a medley of their top songs—including “What I want” and “Spice up your life”—from atop the cars as they drove a circuit around the stadium.
“I can’t believe how lucky as a nation, as a planet, how lucky we were to see The Spice Girls tonight,” said David Evans, the most enthusiastic Spice Girl fan of all.
After the musical prelude, the athletes arrived, accompanied by the flagbearers, and assembled inside the Union Jack formation, symbolically marching and smiling together as ‘one nation.’
Next, dancers carried in 303 white boxes representing all the Olympic events to the tune of Kate Bush’s “Running up that hill,” assembling them into the shape of a pyramid.
Following tradition, the marathon winners were presented with their medals after the men completed their event earlier in the day.
A small group of volunteers walked to the center of the stage bearing bunches of flowers and representing the 70,000 volunteers who contributed to the games, personifying the Olympic ideals of friendship and respect.
“One thing that really struck me,” said Mrs. VanRooyen of South Africa who watched the ceremony live with her husband, “was when the volunteers were thanked, the crowd just roared. There was just so much appreciation.”
Overall, VanRooyen said she was moved by “the absolute appreciation of the crowd, the way the crowd came together ... It was unbelievable, it was awesome, it was mind-blowing, it was like something we’ve never, ever seen in our lives before!”
A tribute to fashion followed the volunteers. Billboards of supermodels symbolizing British fashion were unveiled to reveal celebrities like Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, dressed in glamorous golden outfits, who strutted their stuff along the catwalk formed by the lines of the Union Jack.
Annie Lennox sailed in on a black boat singing “Little Bird,” followed by actor-comedian Russell singing atop a Technicolor bus, introducing a sixties scene of Beatles music. DJ Fatboy Slim took over the act as the bus opened out into a massive inflatable octopus.
Still burning bright after 16 days, the Olympic Cauldron was finally extinguished to signal the end of the Olympic Games in England’s capital.
London handed the Olympic flag over to Rio de Janeiro, host of the 2016 Games, followed by a short Carnival-style presentation of Brazilian culture.
The show was choreographed by Artistic Director Kim Gavin and his creative team.
After a year of preparing for the ceremony, dancer Kat Kowalczyk, 20, was sad to see it all end, but exalted the success of the spectacle.
“It was really busy. There were so many little kids and also celebrities. I met Annie Lennox, The Spice Girls, Madness, David Beckham,” said Kowalczyk, expressing particular excitement over having met Madness. Kowalczyk said that “all [the dancers] are planning on doing a reunion, we’ve spent so much time together and had so much fun in a year’s run up to it.”
With reporting by Tara MacIsaac
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