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The 2022 Winter Olympics kicked off on Friday (February 4) with a visually captivating opening ceremony in the "Bird's Nest" National Stadium in Beijing. An estimated 3,000 people performed during the ceremony, which highlighted the country's youth. 95% of the performers were teenagers.
The ceremony, which took place on the first day of Spring by the Chinese calendar, started with an homage to the season featuring dancers waving glowing green stalks and green and white fireworks that spelled out the word "spring."
The rest of the ceremony focused on the "Story of a Snowflake" and featured stunning winter imagery on a 124,000 square-foot LED stage designed to look like a sheet of ice. Lasers carved figures from the previous 23 Winter Olympics into a giant 3-D ice cube. Hockey players then "broke" the cube revealing the Olympic Rings.
After that, Greece led the "parade of nations" into the stadium. The order of the remaining participating nations was determined by stroke number in the first character of their Chinese name.
Once all of the countries made their way into the stadium, Uyghur athlete Dinigeer Yilamujiang and Zhao Jiawen carried the Olympic Torch into the stadium and lit the snowflake-shaped cauldron.