TELEVISION / Jolly good sports

AT THE opening of the Olympics (BBC 1, Saturday), Carreras and Caballe sung a duet, a large cyborg representing Hercules fought a mock battle with the beasts of the sea and several hundred people joined hands in rings and heart-shapes, in the manner made popular by building society advertisements. 'Let the doves enjoy their freedom and take with them their own message of peace and harmony,' said our commentator David Coleman, probably not off the top of his head.

It looked great from the skies, but in their position trackside, Desmond Lynam and Gary Lineker could barely contain their confusion. 'Certainly different,' said Lynam, for once mildly ruffled. Lineker smiled gamely. Employing a footballer to remark on an all-singing, all-dancing and distinctly non-sporting spectacular is almost as odd as getting David Coleman to commentate on it. But not quite. 'We had to expect something a bit different from the country that brought us Gaudi, Dali and Miro,' Gary opined. 'It all goes back to the Civil War,' he added, before offering us a crisp paragraph on the history of Spain under Franco. We're used to Lineker being touted as a remarkable meeting between footballer and brains, but there are signs he is becoming precocious.

Back in the arena, the teams surged in. It was a joy to watch. They held up hand-written banners and mugged wildly for the television cameras, all happy to play the Olympic Village idiot. Frequently we cut away to benignly smiling figures in the VIP box, though Coleman never enlightened us about them, not even when they were Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro. Perhaps he wasn't seeing these shots, or maybe this was his own personal contribution to the fight to keep politics out of sport.

Some hope. Here, pretty well every detail attested to some weighty shift in recent history. There was a black South African, carrying the flag for his 'rehabilitated' nation. There was the united German team and the Estonians, the Latvians, the Lithuanians, the Bosnians. There were the Iraqis, noisily whistled and hissed at all the way round the stadium. And there were the Iranians, who richly deserved the same treatment for being the only nation not to allow a woman to carry their nameplate.

Other outrages were simply sartorial. The Canadian team appeared to be wearing motel wallpaper, while the Australian outfit was based, apparently, on a squashed-animal motif. Many other nations played safe by opting for ceremonial dress, the Mongolians even managing to get some swords past security. You were racking your brains to remember what constitutes the British national costume these days (a shell suit?), but then our team walked in wearing navy blue blazers and panama hats, and you remembered: it's a British Airways uniform.

The Mayor of Barcelona spoke from the podium, while Coleman pretended he was providing a simultaneous translation rather than merely reading from the programme notes in front of him. (The technique here is to break sentences down into smaller units and insert a few thoughtful pauses: 'I have the honour of greeting you. All.') But the Mayor bumped him right off the track. 'I think he's gone away from the prepared text,' blurted Coleman. He had, and in fact, for the last 20 seconds or so, he had been speaking in English.

This was the moment the Mayor called for a truce in Yugoslavia. The part of the speech which made the News immediately afterwards (the message of peace and harmony, indeed) was the part which Coleman had rendered inaudible. In this Olympics, Coleman may well be the biggest hurdle the viewer at home faces.

On Sunday morning, the first medal of the Games went, in a ceremony notably devoid of opera singers, model Greek Gods and indeed spectators, to a female air- rifle shooter from South Korea. Meanwhile, over at the swimming pool, Britain's Nick Gillingham was ready to dive in the qualifying rounds of the 100m breaststroke. 'The butterflies are going 100 miles an hour in his stomach,' said Andy Jameson. He might have come nowhere in the end, but at least his butterflies were trained to Olympic standards.