Fireworks have lit up the night sky in Rio de Janeiro with the start of the Olympic opening ceremony. The pageant is celebrating Brazil’s history and culture, which will include music and dance.

Transcript

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

The opening ceremony for the Rio Olympics has been a swirl of dance, music and a vintage biplane flying through the stadium and seeming to soar out over the city. And, of course, there’s the athletes Parade of Nations. NPR’s Melissa Block is in Rio, watching the ceremony. And she’s with us now. Hi there.

MELISSA BLOCK, BYLINE: Hey, Kelly.

MCEVERS: So we should explain that you are way ahead of us of knowing what’s going on. NBC, the U.S. rights holder for the Olympics, tape delayed the ceremonies by an hour in the East. It’ll be four hours delayed here on the West Coast. So tell us what we missed.

BLOCK: OK, so spoiler alerts to everybody listening because we do have a jump on you from here in Rio. We have seen a lot of exuberant dance, as you would expect, from – everything from samba, to funk, to native dance, even a bit of twerking. We saw supermodel Gisele Bundchen embodying “The Girl From Ipanema.” Although, Kelly, I have to tell you when I picture that tall and tan and young and lovely girl walk to the sea, I am not picturing her in silver lame and stiletto heels. But that’s just me.

There is also – I mean, on a totally different note, a really strong environmental theme to this ceremony. There was a really somber portion, showing the dire effects of climate change on the planet and sea level rise. There were maps showing Dubai and the Netherlands getting swallowed by the sea. And as part of this green theme, every athlete in this Parade of Nations is being given the seed of a tree – 500 different native species of Brazil. They’re pressing those seeds into soil in capsules. And those capsules are supposed to be planted after the games in one of the Olympic venues to become a new forest.

MCEVERS: So the Parade of Nations, is it still going on?

BLOCK: It is still going on. We are up to – let me check – it was Switzerland a minute ago. And I have to tell you, there was a great moment a few minutes ago. South Sudan just entered Maracana Stadium. There are two new countries who became officially recognized by the Olympic Committee this year – Kosovo is one, South Sudan another. And went the South Sudanese flag bearer came into the stadium, he pumped his fist and did a little dance. And you could they are really excited to be here for the first time.

It’s worth noting that there are a number of athletes who are going to compete later on in the games, in the second week, who aren’t even here in Rio yet. So they’re obviously not taking part in this parade. And there are also some athletes who compete early – you know, this weekend, who aren’t marching in the parade because this is a really long night to be on your feet, and they want to preserve their strength.

MCEVERS: I understand organizers had drastically cut the budget for this opening ceremony. What led to that?

BLOCK: Right. Well, you know, Brazil is in a severe economic crisis. It’s been undergoing a terrible recession. And one of the creative directors of the ceremony, the noted film director Fernando Meirelles, said that look, when we started we were rich. And then we had to cut, cut, cut. We had to get rid of some of our toys, as he put it. He also, though, put it in perspective. He said, look, when 40 percent of the homes in Brazil have no sanitation, you can’t really be spending a billion reals for a show.

And they’ve actually used the term MacGyvering in terms of how they’re approaching this. In other words – and I have to confess, I’ve never seen the show – but I gather the idea is that this is a secret…

MCEVERS: Oh, yeah.

BLOCK: …Agent who improvised – you know better than I.

MCEVERS: Absolutely.

BLOCK: Who improvises with – I’m revealing my ignorance here – improvises with everyday items, fixing big problems, you know, with makeshift fixes. I have to say, it looks pretty great. If they’re MacGyvering, they’re doing a really a good job.

MCEVERS: Quickly, what’s still to come tonight?

BLOCK: Legendary singers Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. Interim…

MCEVERS: Wow.

BLOCK: …Brazilian President Michel Temer will pronounce the games open. He has said he does expect to be booed. But he quoted a Brazilian writer who said that at Maracana Stadium, even the moment of silence gets booed.

MCEVERS: That’s NPR’s Melissa Block in Rio de Janeiro, covering the Olympics. Thanks so much.

BLOCK: You bet.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Surfing will be coming to the Olympics in 2020. The International Olympic Committee approved the sport for the upcoming Tokyo Games. Surfers in Southern California had a variety of reactions to the news, from “gnarly” to saying the Olympics were “50 years late.”

Transcript

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

The Olympics start tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro. But the world is already planning for the next Summer Games, Tokyo 2020. And the International Olympic Committee just announced that Tokyo will feature five new sports, including for the first time ever, surfing.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

We caught up with a few surfers in Los Angeles to see what they thought.

DAVID HIRSCH: Wow, that’s gnarly.

MCEVERS: That’s 24-year-old David Hirsch. He was decked out in his wet suit waxing his board. And he was about to head down to the ocean when we broke the news.

HIRSCH: Like, I’m not, like, waving, like, a surf flag, but it would just be cool for people to be able to see something new, some different sport that they weren’t exposed to before or something.

CORNISH: Gaby Herbst was packing up her board and strapping it to the top of her car. She’s a high school teacher. And she has time to surf while on summer break.

MCEVERS: And even though you might not think of Japan when you think of surfing, she says it’s a good choice.

GABY HERBST: I think it’s a fun place for it to start because internationally, I wouldn’t say that it’s the biggest scene. But they do have really good waves out there.

CORNISH: She is a little skeptical that the biggest names in surfing will come out to the Olympics, though, since it’s around the same time of professional surfing competitions.

HERBST: Like, I don’t know who’s going to give up, you know, all those points for missing out on a comp and all that money to go compete in the Olympics.

MCEVERS: Then there’s Matt Muzio. He grew up in Hawaii and started surfing at the age of 12, about 40 years ago.

CORNISH: And he’s basically over it.

MATT MUZIO: They’re about 50 years late.

MCEVERS: Fifty years late and for all the wrong reasons.

MUZIO: I think the whole thing’s a joke. It has nothing to do with surfing. It has everything to do with money. Surfing’s a soul sport. It’s about going out in the morning and surfing. What are the Olympics going to do for surfing?

CORNISH: Lauren Bos was coming out of the water when we spoke to her. She and her friends have been talking about the Olympics news since yesterday.

LAUREN BOS: Yeah, it was, like, all my girlfriends that we all surf, and our group text is called wave babes. They’re all still in the water, actually, yeah (laughter).

MCEVERS: She just started surfing two years ago, and she’s hooked.

BOS: I mean, it sounds very hippy, but, like, I caught the stoke. I know that sounds really silly, but, I mean, it really is, like, once you start, you can’t stop. And it’s all you think about. And you watch videos and you watch other surfers. And you start recognizing all the big names and follow their Instagram accounts and just start recognizing good style when you see it.

CORNISH: She’s excited to see some of the big names compete. But one downside, all the Olympic attention might bring more people to her favorite surf spots.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

20 years ago TODAY, @ussoccer_wnt defeated China for its first Olympic?!

? to kick off #Rio2016 with USA vs. NZL!https://t.co/KYg0ucdlCo

— U.S. Olympic Team (@TeamUSA) August 3, 2016

#IOCLuxuryLodging. Putting together a shower curtain so we can shower and not flood the place. pic.twitter.com/omaBJ7Dlje

— Andrew Bogut (@andrewbogut) August 2, 2016

Footvolley is a sport played like it sounds: A volleyball is kicked around like soccer with no hands. The U.S. and other countries are sending teams to Brazil, but it’s not an Olympic sport yet.

Transcript

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

The 2016 Summer Olympic Games begin next Friday, but sports fans might be drawn to a game taking place outside of the Olympics on the beaches of Rio. It is footvolley. And, as the name implies, it’s a combination of volleyball and soccer. It’s catching on in the U.S. And, as NPR’s Greg Allen reports, it will get international exposure during this year’s games in Brazil.

GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: On a beach in Sunny Isles in a town just north of Miami, Benny Astorga is putting members of the USA footvolley team through training drills.

BENNY ASTORGA: Good. Come on. Let’s go. Put it away. Good.

ALLEN: He tosses up a volleyball as the players use their feet then their chest to keep the ball in play, and finally a head shot puts it over the net. It’s basically volleyball played soccer-style. Astorga says that’s how the game got started in Brazil in the mid-1960s. Soccer players were looking for a game to play on the beach.

ASTORGA: It was banned to play football on the sand. They saw some open-court nets, decided, you know, go over there and see who could keep it up the longest and a sport grew out of it, you know?

MELONY POVIONES: People see it, and they’re like – they’re in awe because they’re like, oh, my goodness, I’ve never seen it before.

ALLEN: Melony Poviones is one of the women on the USA footvolley team set to compete in Rio. The U.S. team will be one of 23 countries taking part in a competition that’s not officially part of the Olympics, but instead is billed as a cultural event. Poviones is from South Florida where the Brazilian-born game is gaining popularity. She’s 24 and grew up playing soccer. She discovered footvolley while recovering from a knee injury.

POVIONES: I used to see the guys playing, so I kind just asked one day. I was like, hey, can I join? Because I played soccer my entire life. So they were like yeah, cool, jump in. And I was – I started getting the hang of it, and I started to love it.

ALLEN: Another team member Sergio Menezes was born in Brazil, grew up in the U.S. He was inspired to get serious about the game nearly 20 years ago. One day, he and some Brazilian friends were on the beach when they were challenged to a game of footvolley. He recalls the challenger, a Brazilian in Miami on vacation, beat them badly.

SERGIO MENEZES: So he just got frustrated. He said you guys are terrible. You know, you’re not real Brazilians. So, that kind of stuck. It was me, a couple of friends of mine. We were all Brazilians looking at each other going, man, we got to learn this sport.

ALLEN: Within a few years, Menezes was into footvolley in a big way. He helped found the U.S. Footvolley Association and began holding tournaments. Later, he and others secured a national sponsor and began the Pro-Footvolley Tour. Menezes is a player, but also a footvolley promoter. It’s a fast-paced game, he says, with a lot of fun, excitement and potential for growth of beach volleyball. In footvolley, the money play, the one that gets fans on their feet, is something called the shark attack.

MENEZES: The shark attack is when a player thrusts his body sort of like he’s going towards the net and at the very last second, he slams it with the bottom of his foot. And it’s very hard to defend because it goes straight down. Yeah, that’s our slam dunk.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: Goes up and…

(APPLAUSE)

ALLEN: That’s a shark attack earlier this year at a pro-footvolley event on Florida’s Hollywood Beach. Menezes helped convince Brazilian footvolley groups to push for an event at this year’s Olympics. The Brazilian Olympic Committee agreed to an international tournament in late August at the beach volleyball arena on Copacabana Beach. It’s not quite an Olympic event, not even an official demonstration sport, but Menezes and other footvolley enthusiasts are thrilled.

MENEZES: What it is it’s when a guy and a girl started going out, and they don’t know what it is. But there’s something there. OK? That’s what it is. I mean, if you’re in Rio and you’re in the Olympic stadium, it’s an amazing sport, and the world’s going to see it. I mean, it’s the first step.

ALLEN: The first step for a fledgling sport that Menezes hopes eventually to see as a medal event at a future Olympics. Greg Allen, NPR News, Miami.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Jonah Keri of CBS Sports talks to NPR’s Robert Siegel about the MLB trade deadline — which teams are angling for what players and why.

Transcript

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

For Major League Baseball fans, it’s that time of year when you don’t just root, root, root for the home team, but for the home team’s general manager. August 1 marks the end of the trading deadline between now and Monday afternoon – GMs who figure their team just might make it to the post-season if they fill that one hole in the lineup and GMs who’ve given up on this year and want to unload a veteran who’s a burden on the payroll.

They all have a long weekend to make their swaps. It’s time to think, not just about depth charts, but about spreadsheets, too. And I suspect that baseball writer Jonah Keri of CBS Sports has been doing just that. Jonah, welcome to the program once again.

JONAH KERI: Thank you for having me.

SIEGEL: And can you explain what’s the idea here? What’s the theory behind there being a deadline on August 1, and what can teams do?

KERI: Well, I mean, you want to set up a situation where there’s some fairness. Everybody knows that the same date is in play. And you also want to have a big enough window where if you’re making a trade, it presumably has an impact. If you make a trade on the last day of the season, it’s not going to help you that much.

If you do it now, you get two plus months of potential performance from a player. So teams that are, as you said, out of the race can say, OK, we want to build for the future. We’re going to trade you our veteran player who might be coming up on free agency or, perhaps, he makes a lot of money, and in exchange we would like prospects. We would like players who might be a couple of years from the big leagues, but have a chance to become good players and to become cheap good players at that.

SIEGEL: There are lots of rumored possible trades out there. What are some of the rumors that you’re watching more carefully?

KERI: Well, the Milwaukee Brewers have really a chance to be in the driver’s seat here because they’re a noncontending club with a lot of good players. Jonathan Lucroy is an excellent two-way catcher. He could potentially go to a team like Cleveland or Texas. The Brewers have some really good relief pitchers named Will Smith and Jeremy Jeffress. So we could see any of that happen.

And the Chicago White Sox also have become intriguing, at least in name if nothing else. Chris Sale and Jose Quintana – two excellent left-handers who are both signed to very team-favorable contracts – it would require a heck of a lot to acquire either of those gentlemen. But if it were to be done, a team like Boston or Texas, especially with a lot of young talent, has the ability to potentially match up.

SIEGEL: Does the record show that the general manager who is bold on July 31 often does very well and should be praised for his trades?

KERI: Interesting that you say that. I just wrote an article for CBS Sports today that argues you can do it both ways. You can certainly shoot the moon and come up big, and we’ve seen that work quite a few times. But the Toronto Blue Jays are an example of a team that this week made two deals, and they gave up virtually nothing, but they specifically addressed weaknesses. They didn’t get superstars, but they got useful players for very little.

And three examples that I posed were the 2014 San Francisco Giants, the 2010 San Francisco Giants and the 2009 New York Yankees. All three of those clubs were really good. They decided, you know what? We’re not necessarily going to make an over-the-top deadline move, and they all went on to win it all. They just relied on the talent that they had, picked up a couple of roll players and just cruised on into the World Series.

And of course, the danger if you trade for a superstar is it might come back to bite you. We’ve seen Hall of Famer John Smoltz was once a prospect who was traded in a deadline deal. So you have to be a little bit careful if you are going to make that gutsy trade that you’re not giving up a guy who could end up being multiples better than the person that you might have rented for two months.

SIEGEL: Jonah Keri of CBS Sports. Jonah, let’s hope neither of us gets traded by Monday afternoon.

KERI: Amen, Robert.

SIEGEL: Jonah hosts the Jonah Keri podcast.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Ichiro Suzuki of the Miami Marlins is just four hits shy of 3,000 hits. He’s expected to reach that milestone during Tuesday’s game. The 42-year-old came to U.S. Major League Baseball from Japan in 2001, when he was met with much doubt. Only 30 baseball legends have hit 3,000.

Transcript

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

Miami Marlins outfielder Ichiro Suzuki is on the verge of reaching one of baseball’s great milestones – 3,000 career hits.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Ichiro to right field – he’s got another hit, four away from 3,000.

SIEGEL: He’s 42 years old, and he could hit that mark as early as tonight.

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

His fans across the country and around the world have been waiting for this moment. Amy Franz of Seattle took three planes and rented a car to be in Miami this week to see her favorite player.

AMY FRANZ: I started counting his hits in 2004. I watched Ichiro play most of his career in Seattle, and the location of my seats was directly behind him. And I just felt that I really needed to be present for the milestone.

SIEGEL: When Ichiro steps up to the plate tonight, he’ll be greeted with the kind of fanfare he didn’t get when he came to the U.S. in 2001 after nine years in Japan’s professional league.

RICH WALTZ: There was doubt as to whether he could come over and perform at the same level.

SIEGEL: Rich Waltz is the play-by-play announcer for the Miami Marlins on Fox Sports Florida. He says Ichiro turned doubters into believers, starting with his first manager in his very first week of spring training with the Seattle Mariners.

WALTZ: Ichiro spent that week hitting weak balls foul on the third base side. His manager Lou Piniella called him into his office and tried to get it across. Look; you need to pull the ball. You need to hit it with a little more authority.

MCEVERS: Lou Piniella wasn’t sure he got the message, but in the game that day…

WALTZ: Ichiro hit three balls off the wall in right field. As he walked through the dugout on his way to the clubhouse, he looked at Piniella and said, are you happy now?

MCEVERS: The hits keep coming, though Waltz says Ichiro doesn’t exactly look the part and even once described his slender arms as…

WALTZ: Toothpicks – if you walked by Ichiro, you would have no idea that he is one of the greatest players in his time in Major League Baseball. And Ichiro said it, look; if a guy that looks like me and is built like me and has success in this game, I think it’s a signal to other kids in both Japan and the United States that in baseball, you don’t have to be 6-foot-5 and 230 pounds.

SIEGEL: Ichiro Suzuki and the Miami Marlins take the field against the Philadelphia Phillies tonight with baseball history in the balance.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.