Reports are emerging from witnesses at the opening ceremony dress rehearsal that Brazil’s favourite catwalk queen Gisele Bundchen will be mugged during her ‘performance’.
According to some of the 3000 guests at the run-through, Gisele struts down a runway to the sound of The Girl From Ipanema before being held up by an actor and robbed.
Police then give chase around the 80,000-seat Maracana Stadium, the venue for the August 6 ceremony (AEST) that’s expected to be watched by almost a billion people.
The unexpected twist is the brainchild of celebrated Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles, the genius behind award-winning crime drama City of God.
Although guarded about the details of the ceremony in the build-up, Fernando has promised to keep it real.
He says he’s mindful that many in the city see the Olympics as an extravagance a country mired in poverty and political upheaval can ill-afford.
According to guests at the rehearsal, during a section on the urbanisation of Brazil, spectators will even hear a song describing Brazil’s high number of road accident victims.
Others who have posted enthusiastically on Instagram have revealed that it starts with a call for peace, before moving through Brazil’s jungles with the indigenous tribes to its cities and the colonisers – ending up in its slums, or favelas, for the main part of the ceremony.
But it will not be a ‘chronological’ piece, telling the tale of the arrival of Brazil’s many different inhabitants over the years, director Leonardo Caetano insisted.
“It will be a reinterpretation of Brazil,” he told the BBC. “We will have a moment in which we will show… the Brazilian way of receiving people. The second is the ‘Garden’. Brazil live on the largest green reserve in the world and this is an important issue for us.”
A source previously told the Daily Mail that Gisele’s segment would be part of the “sexiest ever” Opening Ceremony.
Yes, there will be “lots of nearly naked women doing the samba,” according to the Daily Mail’s source, but “[this] is Brazil, after all, where the female body is celebrated like no other place on Earth.”
