Gallery: Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics opening ceremony
The winter games officially open with a spectacular show at the Bird’s Nest




The opening ceremony was “a spectacle of music, choreography and technology”, said The Guardian. Fourteen years after overseeing both ceremonies at Beijing 2008, Oscar-nominated cinematographer Zhang Yimou was back as director.

Beijing 2022’s Olympic cauldron was lit after seven torchbearers carried six torches in the final torch relay inside the Bird's Nest, CNN said. “All the torchbearers are Chinese winter sport athletes born in sequential decades – the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and the last two torchbearers from the 2000s.”

The Olympic torch was “placed into the centre of a giant snowflake, which was then illuminated to become the cauldron”, the BBC said. The snowflake was made up of placards with the names of the 91 nations competing at Beijing 2022.
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