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| Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, centre, is flanked by Britain’s Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, and IOC President Jacques Rogge, left, as she attends the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Summer Games at the Olympic Stadium in London, on Friday. |
1960 Rome; the Olympic Games that changed my world; the singular essence of the Olympic Games where the world is a stage and all the players take the same stage at the same time, performing a passionate display of nations, races, ideologies, talents, styles, and aspirations that no single venues, not even the United Nations, can match. 1960 Rome offered me times of deep psychological reflections. I made uninformed, inexperienced, emotional and terminal decisions that changed the course of my destiny. It mirrored me deep insight into the flaws of my character. I succumbed to a silent dramatisation of my behavior. The forces of change were everywhere. Interwoven in so many complex ways one can see an older order changing and a new one emerging or being born. The world as I know it today was coming into view. Darkness fell slowly as the one depicted in Derek Walcott’s Omeras. I had just lost my “MEL” because of my inability to muzzle my elusive dreams. It was a period blessed with divine interventions for the greater good. This was an experience I lived not to regret, but to treasure.
The world was changing, I had to learn how to adapt. The cold war was apparent, there was one Germany, one Soviet Union, and The River Tiber no longer was the waterway of Caesars’ galleons. The Seven Hills of Rome were there to fathom my thirst for a new day. Then, there was the Vatican. The consoling factor. It questioned my spirituality. The city gave inviolability and refuge to my consumed passion. I was invited to the Vatican. The Journey from Arima through San Raphael, Las Lomas No 3 was very visual, very real; it gave support to my existence and meaning to my travel to Via della Sagrestia, into the “anticamera Pontificia.”
It reads:“Permesso personale per prender parte all’Udienza concessa da Sua Santitia Giovanni XXIII PP, ai partecipanti alla XVII Olimpiade di Roma, mercoledi 24 corr.,alle ore 17,30 precise, in Piazza S Pietro. Vaticano,18 agosto 1960” signed Mario Nasalli Rocca Di Cornelianoo (Maestro Di Camera Di Sua Santita)
The Pope asked for a world of peace. Today 52 years later, a new Pope again asks for peace in his message to a changing world. There was tension in the sixties; a cold war, a unified Soviet Union, one Germany, racial tensions in the USA, revolutions in South America, and tension in South Africa. There was a Cassius Clay, the drama continues, the first doping scandal, the first commercially televised games. The advent of rival brothers Adidias and Puma, the crumbling of amateurism, defections from oppressions, claims of Independence movements in the West Indies, sub-Saharan Africa. The Pope’s Olympic message credits the power of sports holding nations and different ideologies together in fierce rivalry but friendly competition. The 85-year-old Pope better known for his scholarly pursuits rather than sporting endeavors passed on the message that: “The Olympics are the greatest sporting event in the world, where athletes from many countries participate, giving it a strong symbolic value.”
What is more symbolic than the bells? I was very moved by the bells of the Vatican in 1960, Rome Olympics. London has chosen Big Ben to continue the symbolic gestures for the 2012 Olympic Games Edgar Allan Poe’s poem stated:
“What a world of merriment their melody foretells.
While the stars that over sprinkle
All the heavens seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells Hear the mellow wedding bells - Golden bells!”
I remember quite vividly the bells of Santa Rosa de Lima of Arima in August 1960. It has sustained significance to my very existence this day. What a world of happiness their harmony foretells. To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells. I was consumed in the future. It foretold of the rapture that impels. Now the people—ah, the people listening to the bells in London.
UK’s Big Ben clock made an historic Olympic ring—Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme. To the throbbing of the bells, Big Ben, the famed bell belonging to Britain’s parliament, chimed non-stop for three minutes on Friday as part of a national event to mark the start of the London Olympics. Other bells in unison rang out around the country. Lawmakers voted in June to rename the Bell Elizabeth’s Tower, in honour of the queen’s diamond jubilee marking her 60th year on the throne. At Friday’s opening ceremony, Queen Elizabeth II was among the 60,000 spectators present at the Olympic Stadium. As British head of state, she officially opened the Games. The young pride of T&T, this generation’s finest have never heard the bells of independence. The River Tiber no longer floods its banks but the River Thames is still commercial. However, they should know that the power of sports can bring T&T as one nation in “TTO” 2013.
