As an invited guest at the two-hour opening extravaganza at the main stadium of Hong Kong’s newest landmark, Kai Tak Sports Park, I found myself exclaiming a few times and swinging through a range of emotions during the opening ceremony, not least during the moment Andy Lau Tak-wah, one of the “Four Heavenly Kings” of Cantopop, appeared on stage.
I gasped, first with delight at the film star’s cameo, and then with a murmur of disappointment when he departed the stage after just three minutes without singing a single song.
I was astonished to see my mother’s silver idols, 77-year-old George Lam Tsz-Cheung and his 63-year-old wife Sally Yeh Chen-ven, singing a medley of Cantopop hits from the 1980s and 90s, with Yeh dancing like a teenager.
At that point, the music was so loud and the lighting so bright that I wished I had a pair of ear plugs and sunglasses with me. The massiveness of the space and its acoustics could be overwhelming.
Later, I was more than a little bemused to see Olympic table tennis champion Fan Zhendong and local paddler Doo Hoi-kem thwack balls at each other using ridiculously big bats in a bizarre clown version of ping pong.
And then I found myself literally feeling the heat and exclaiming as spectacular plumes of fire flared towards the retractable rooftop in my first experience of an indoor pyrotechnics display at a tremendous scale.
Leigha Drews
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