page_title: 2010 Winter Olympics opening ceremony
section_title: Parade of the Nations
hierarchical_section_title: 2010 Winter Olympics opening ceremony / Program / Parade of the Nations
caption_attribution_description: The Canadian athletes enter the stadium at the opening ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics. Visible at the front carrying the flag is Clara Hughes.
context_page_description: The Opening Ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics was held on February 12, 2010 beginning at 6:00 pm PST at BC Place Stadium in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. This was the first Olympic opening ceremony to be held indoors. It was directed by David Atkins.
  The event was officially opened by Governor General Michaëlle Jean, representative of Elizabeth II, Queen of Canada. The opening ceremony was dedicated by the Vancouver Organizing Committee to Nodar Kumaritashvili, a Georgian luger who died earlier in the day in a training run. An audience of 61,600 were in attendance at the venue. There were an estimated 4,500 performers.
context_section_description: The participating countries marched in, with Greece coming first, then the other nations ending with the host nation, Canada. The names of the nations were announced first in French and followed by English, the official languages of the Olympics, which also happened to be the official languages of the host nation. The nations entered in alphabetic order of their country names in English because it is the more dominant of the two languages in Vancouver and in the province of British Columbia.
  The team from Georgia was greeted with a standing ovation out of respect for their colleague, Nodar Kumaritashvili, who died in a luge accident earlier that day. The team left an empty space in the processional and left the stadium immediately following the procession. They had indicated they would not participate in the opening ceremony or withdraw completely, but decided against doing so. The team wore black scarves and armbands to honor Kumaritashvili while a black ribbon was affixed to the team's flag. Teams from some countries, including Australia, Azerbaijan also wore black armbands in respect of Kumaritashvili.
  China, which hosted the last Olympics in Beijing, also got a standing ovation due to the large Chinese population in Vancouver, as did the United States, which received the loudest ovation before Canada entered two minutes later.
caption: The entrance of the Canadian athletes into BC Place Stadium.
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