In a country of great economic inequality, the opening ceremony celebrated the culture of the favelas, the slums that hang vertiginously above the renowned beaches of Rio and ring the site of Friday’s spectacle, the famed Maracana stadium.

There was no glossing over history either: from the arrival of the Portuguese and their conquest of the indigenous populations to the use of African slave labour for 400 years.

The clash of cultures, as the ceremony showed, is what makes Brazil the complex mosaic that it is. Home to the Amazon, the world’s largest forest, Brazil used the ceremony to call on the 3 billion people watching the opening of the world’s premiere sporting event to take care of the planet, plant seeds and reconquer the verdant land that Europeans found here five centuries ago.

Unlike the opening ceremonies in Beijing in 2008 and London 2012, a financially constrained Brazil had little choice but to put on a more “analogue” show, with minimal high-tech and a heavy dependence on the vast talent of Brazil and its Carnival party traditions.

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