Beijing Winter Olympics Closing Ceremony Highlights Technology and Philosophy

The Beijing Winter Olympics drew to a close on Sunday, with the Chinese team winning 15 medals. Zhang Yimou, the general director of the closing ceremony, once again showed off Chinese romance at the show, which lasted close to 100 minutes, through rich technology and artistic interpretation.

The show drew an end to the Beijing Winter Olympics by continuing to express the story of a snowflake. According to Zhang Yimou, more than 2,000 athletes joined in the show last night, breaking an Olympic record.

In terms of aesthetic tone, the design team boldly integrated red with rich Chinese characteristics, and blue symbolizing winter sports, and took Chinese traditional cultural symbols such as lanterns and Chinese knots as performance elements.

Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee, said in an exclusive interview with CCTV yesterday afternoon that according to IOC’s forecast, the market value of winter sports in China will reach $150 billion in 2025, which will bring great impetus to winter sports all over the world.

Chinese Knot

At the first show of the closing ceremony, a big snowflake slowly descended from the Bird’s Nest stadium, and a group of children played in the ice and snow with snowflake lanterns emitting warm yellow light.

The construction area of the ground stage for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Winter Olympics is about 21,000 square meters. More than 40,000 screens form a super-large ground display screen of 10,522 square meters.

At the children’s feet, a huge emblem of Beijing Winter Olympics gradually took shape. After the ceremony of raising the national flag and playing the national anthem, 12 crystal ice carts entered the stadium, which adopted the shape of twelve Chinese zodiac signs. Then, countless red ribbons flew into the stadium from all directions, decorating the snowflake torch platform into huge red Chinese knots. The design of a Chinese knot contains many elements, including cloisonne, blue and white porcelain, silk, red ribbon and rime.

Farewell Represented by Wicker

After the award ceremony for athletes and a thanking ceremony for volunteers, Beijing bid farewell to friends gathered from all over the world with a willow twig. The Chinese character for the willow tree is a homophone of the character liu, which means asking a person to stay when bidding farewell.

With the song “Farewell,” 80 dancers walked slowly into the venue. In the center of the field, countless green beams passed through the snowflake torch platform and reached the sky, forming a big tree.

This light feast adopts the pure laser display technology developed by Casiris Vision. This technology uses tricolor lasers as light source, which is the only display technology that can fully realize the latest international standard BT.2020.

Starry Olympic Rings

The Olympic rings this year built by China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation are the “mini version” of the rings unveiled at the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

The Olympic rings raised last night are 18 meters wide, 11.75 meters high and 5 meters in diameter. They are composed of 21,000 LED lamp beads and are called “Starry Rings” by the staff.

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The “Starry Rings” use two sets of battery as power supply. If one set is out of order, the other set will work immediately, which can support performances for more than 60 minutes.