Niyonshuti to carry flag at opening ceremony

RWANDA’s Olympic team captain Adrien Niyonshuti will carry the country’s flag at today’s opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games, which is anticipated to be a highly spectacular event, to be held at the Olympic Stadium.The opening ceremony for the 30th Olympiad, which will feature 10,000 athletes from 205 nations, will start at 9pm Rwandan time. Niyonshuti will lead Team Rwanda into the Olympic stadium after Russia.The mountain biker, his coach Jonathan Boyer, and mechanical Maxime, arrived in the Olympic Village yesterday from his training base in Switzerland.The rider, who will not compete until a fortnight later, will head back to Switzerland on Saturday to continue with his training camp.Niyonshuti said yesterday, “I am extremely humbled and privileged to lead my country at the opening ceremony,”The three-hour opening ceremony has been dubbed, “The Isles of Wonder” and will be directed by Oscar winning filmmaker Danny Boyle (“Sunshine”, “28 Days Later”).Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, will officially open the London Games. The day will proceed with the introduction of Heads of State, the parade of athletes, speeches, creative performances, Olympic Anthem, Olympic flag presentation, oaths, and the grand finale. And it is slated to cost 27 million British pounds, according to the UK Daily Mail newspaper. This will buy what is shaping up to be quite the exciting day. The stadium will be packed with at least 62,000 spectators, 16,000 athletes, 10,000 performers, 70 sheep, 12 horses, 10 chickens, three cows, two goats and even dogs and geese.The event will also attract more than 100 Heads of State in Britain’s largest ever meeting of VVIPs.IOC President Jacques Rogge, Queen Elizabeth and British Minister Queen Elizabeth will be joined by Brazil President Dilma Rousseff, US First Lady Michelle Obama, Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Bahrain’s prince Nasser bin Hamad al-Khalifa and former Prime Ministers Sir John Major and Gordon Brown in a ceremony that will be telecast to an audience of more than one billion viewers.The Olympics opening ceremony’s grand finale begins with the carrying of the Olympic Flame into the stadium, where it will be passed among the competing athletes and finally handed off to the ceremonial Torchbearer, the lucky soul who gets to light the Olympic cauldron, symbolically kicking off the 2012 Summer Olympics in London before all the world. The cauldron will burn until the end of the 2012 Olympics.

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Niyonshuti to carry flag at opening ceremony