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Jack could get an early cameo, or could be saved for the handover ceremony later..And there will be music.. Probably not the kind of music you will buy later on CD..

The March of the Athletes

The main business kicks off with a parade of every

competing nation’s flag and name board.. Compared to the opening ceremony this is mercifully brisk..The flag bearers and placard holders will then go and line up somewhere, probably near the Olympic flag..Then the athletes will show up in a great unstructured crowd.. Note how well policed they are, though Mexico 1968 was memorable for some unscripted sprints by Nigerian athletes who broke out to embrace the crowd..

The Marathon Medals

Earlier in the day the men’s marathon will have been

run, the competitors crossing the finishing line in the Olympic Stadium.. Its medal ceremony will feature somewhere in the mix.. If you have watched a fraction of the 10,000 hours plus of sporting action over the previous fortnight, this can be your medal ceremony too.. Relive those late nights when you caught up on the early rounds of the volleyball.. Feel righteous in your endurance of the very real pain of the early rounds of the 50m rifle; pat yourself on the back for those hours you put in watching weightlifting and water polo..

Flags and Speeches

Now take a deep breath, we’ve got to get through

the flags, anthems and speeches bit..There may well be more fanfares at this point, plus other specially commissioned musical concoctions. .Atlanta, for example, took the opportunity to pay tribute to the athletes with a tune called ‘Faster Higher Stronger’, followed by Gloria Estefan belting out ‘Reach’..

Next up is the lowering of the Greek flag and the playing of the Greek national anthem..Then there will be lots of introductions in various languages before Lord Coe, chief cheese of the Local Organising Committee, gets his slot..There will be an awful

lot of thank yous, possibly hints of relief and a touch of valediction.. Finally, the president of the IOC, Jacques Rogge, will say:

I declare the Games of the Thirtieth Olympiad closed and, in accordance with tradition, I call upon the youth of the world to assemble four years from now in Rio de Janeiro to celebrate the Games of the Thirty-First Olympiad..

This is the president’s chance to pass judgement.. Rogge’s predecessor Juan Antonio Samaranch got himself stuck on an escalator of superlatives, pronouncing every Games he attended, ‘the best ever Olympics’ – a comment he pointedly withheld from Atlanta 1996.. Rogge has made it clear that he will never use this phrase, describing Beijing as just ‘truly exceptional’..

The Handover

speeches done, the new host nation’s flag will be raised

and its national anthem played: at London 2012, this will be Brazil..Then the Olympic flag comes down, to another round of the Olympic anthem (see The Opening Ceremony, p..12), and London will pass the baton to the representatives of Rio 2016.. The floor is now theirs for about ten minutes.. At Beijing 2008, the London delegation parked a red double-decker bus at one end of the stadium, out of which emerged Leona Lewis, Jimmy Page and David Beckham to the riff of ‘Whole Lotta Love’. . The world was suitably underwhelmed.. Expect more from the Brazilians at London 2012, including a good dose of scantily clad samba..

Lights Out!

The final ceremonial act is the extinguishing of the

Olympic flame.. Simple as this task might seem, past producers have managed to make a remarkable business of it..The compulsory programme now complete, the ceremony will move on to the music.. Hopefully the athletes will be breaking ranks to dance and the crowd will be out of its seats..

The Closing Ceremony Story

The ancient Olympics closed with oath taking, vener-

ating and feasting. .The closing ceremony of the first modern Olympiad didn’t stretch to feasting and was delayed by torrential rain for a day but Athens 1896 did sign off with fanfares and odes, silver medals for the champions and a victory parade for all the medallists led by Spyridon Louis, winner of the marathon..The King of Greece (the Danish-born George I) declared the Games closed and left the stadium to the strains of the Greek national anthem..

At Antwerp 1920 the Olympic flag had made its appearance at the opening ceremony, so symmetry dictated that the Games ended with its lowering..This ritual, which would become the central feature of the closing ceremony, was given suitable grandeur by a booming fusillade from the Belgian army’s artillery and a cantata sung by a massed choir. . Next time around, at Paris 1924, they raised the flags and sung the anthems of France (as current hosts) and the Netherlands (the next hosts) and handed the Olympic flag over to the latter..The Greeks, who had wanted to be hosts every time, had to be satisfied with having their flag raised and anthem

sung at this handover ceremony..

The big full stop to the Games, the extinguishing of the Olympic flame, was introduced in a low-key way in 1928 (when the flame first appeared).. But it was at Berlin 1936 that lighting and extinguishing of the Olympic cauldron became fixed and dramatic features of the Games..

The immediate post-war Games were rather low key affairs, closing, as our man T..S.. Eliot would have put it, not with a bang but a whimper.. London 1948 featured music from the Band of the Guards and a column of boy scouts carrying wooden name placards.. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth sent a representative as they had already quit town for Balmoral and the start of the grouse shooting season.. Most of the athletes had also already gone home.. But at Melbourne 1956 there was a bit more spirit to the occasion, and the last key element – the athletes entering the stadium together without national groupings – debuted.. It came

dress were meant to dispense necklaces and feathered headbands to the athletes and the crowd..Although the intention was to honour Canada’s First Nation, the organisers bodged things by recruiting a Montreal troupe, made-up and dressed as native Canadians, to dance to La Danse Sauvage..The bare faced cheek of the display was best answered by Michael Leduc, who stripped off in the stands and headed into the arena to cavort amongst the performers..The Mounties let the world rediscover the ancient Olympic love of the naked male body for three minutes before moving in..

The Olympic dance routines had got going, predictably, at Mexico 68, where a supersized mariachi band arrived in the midst of the athletes to whip up a frenzy..This was all a bit too undignified and worryingly spontaneous for the IOC and the organisers of Munich and Montreal, who tried to keep athlete numbers and spirits down. . But at least the Canadians’ pseudo-Indian dances were recognition that the Games needed something more upbeat to go out on than sombre rituals, hymns and anthems..

In a clumsy, gargantuan way, Moscow 1980 was another step in the right direction.. Once the flags and the speeches were done it was show time, albeit in a form calculated to float the boat of the octogenarian politburo of the Soviet Communist Party..The massed bands of various wings of the Soviet military were given a stomping outing, thousands of rhythmic gymnasts whirled their ribbons in formation and giant Russian dolls waddled their way around the field..Then a huge Misha – the Games’ ursine mascot with its implausible fixed smile – came to say goodbye, clutching a bunch of balloons..A card stunt from the stands displayed Misha crying, then everyone cried as the balloons pulled the bear away from the sea of tearful Slavic schmaltz and up into the night sky..

The logic of the Cold War demanded that Los Angeles 1984 show the communist world how it should be done..Where Moscow had to make do with coloured cardboard squares, LA could hand out 100,000 electric torches for the crowd to light..Then in a live pastiche of every Hollywood alien UFO flick, a flying saucer came to hover above the stadium..At last, we had a proper Olympics party.. Indeed a disco, spearheaded by the figure of Lionel Richie..

Party, Karamu, Fiesta, Forever ...

Since LA 1984,no Olympic closing ceremony can be complete without a performance from a leading figure or two from the world of popular music, and a playlist that people can dance to.What now seems obvious was once a mystery, and it fell to the king of Californian soul schmooze, Lionel Richie, to show us the way. From the moment he appeared in his blue sequinned track suit and tight white slacks, Lionel oozed class and confidence. As befits the man who brought us ‘Easy Like Sunday Morning’, Lionel brought laid-back charm and mellow grooves to an occasion previously notable for its tight-arsed aesthetic.A stadium-sized, neon-lit dance floor pulsated around him as he thanked the crowd and sang an Olympic length version of ‘All Night Long’ – the late-disco classic spiced

with salsa rhythms and a horn section of gilded smoothness.

After working the crowd Lionel ascended onto a pulsating multicoloured Olympic podium while more than 400 break dancers took to the floor. Mummified figures span round on their heads; ladies in red leather miniskirts struck a sequence of robotic poses. Lionel’s injunction to the world?‘Party,Karamu, Fiesta,Forever’.The closing ceremony would never be the same again.

Barcelona 1992 was big on pageantry, planetary balloons and fire dancing.. Placido Domingo, Jose Carreras and that well-known Spaniard Sarah Brightman all sang beautifully, while Freddie Mercury provided the Games’ best-known theme tune.. More hits followed atAtlanta 1996,which shrugged off its critics (commercial crassness ..... and a bomb attack on the Centennial Olympic park that killed two people and injured over 100), as everyone took their cue from President Bill Clinton.. He was smiling like a Cheshire cat as Boyz II Men did their a capella take on the ‘Star Spangled Banner’, alongside an A-list that included Little Richard, Stevie Wonder, Gloria Estefan,Tito Puente and BB King..To top it all, Reverend Al Green, pastor to the global soul, delivered an epic version of ‘Take Me to the River’ backed by The Pointer Sisters..

Sydney 2000 presented the nation’s cultural crown jewels: supermodel Elle McPherson,comedian Paul Hogan (AKA Crocodile

Dundee), golfer Greg Norman and, of course, Kylie Minogue..The set mixed up Kylie’s super camp version of ‘Dancing Queen’ with thumping Oz rock from John Paul Young and INXS, before going out with a sentimental sing-song of‘Waltzing Matilda’by folk legend Slim Dusty..

It is just as well that the Greeks invented satire, for they can hardly blame the rest of us for retrospectively reading the closing ceremony of Athens 2004 as a biting commentary on the nation’s tragic borrowing binge..The opening music, perhaps addressed to the gods of the derivative and bond markets, was entitled ‘May the Dances Last for Ever’.. How prescient that the Games were closed by young girl extinguishing the Olympic cauldron with a single breath.. Job done, Greece got down to the party with an unrelentingly domestic line up of old chanteuses, melancholy crooners, pop playboys in testosterone overdrive and mass bouzouki madness..

Beijing 2008 was acrobat-heavy but musically rather light and while no one could accuse the Chinese of skimping, there was no way they could top their own opening ceremony.. Still they threw in a gigantic orange human tower, representing the eternal Olympic flame, thousands of drummers, bell dancers and the best of East Asian pop.. Beijing let us know in no uncertain terms that China is the rising power of this world, though the pop stars on offer may just have revealed its Achilles heel..