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A dust storm hit Doha on the opening day of the Qatar World Cup.
The wind came from the northwest, coming from across the desert, long ago started by the flapping of a butterfly’s wings elsewhere in the world.
A blanket of haze obscured the horizon at the best of times, but this storm was denser, more dangerous, reaching high into the sky.
It turned the Sun deep red as it dipped toward Earth, like a wide, unblinking eye in an unusual tournament starting below.
On Monday morning, the Al Bayt Stadium, hosting the opening ceremony of the World Cup and its first match between the hosts and Ecuador, emerged from a haze of dust a few kilometers away from our media bus.
It seemed unreal, this huge Bedouin tent: something you recognized but didn’t quite expect to be here, rising out of a swirl of sand over an otherwise flat, empty landscape.
As we got closer, the wind picked up, bending the newly planted trees and slapping the FIFA-branded flags that line the main streets leading out of the stadium.
Despite our early departure, we still got stuck in kilometer-long queues crawling through the endless parking areas towards the main entrance. For a place that has taken more than a decade to be ready to welcome the world, it seems that not even they were expecting it.
We approach the stadium from the west, past one of the two main driveways that carry diplomats and VIPs to its front. Shining along the road is a cavalcade of camels and horses, escorted by policemen dressed in traditional attire with rifles slung over their shoulders.
The stadium lights are now on, and a giant torch has been lit further down the street. It resembles a campfire that keeps passengers warm at night. Several black cars with blacked out windows slide past, leaving a cloud of questions behind.
Once inside, questions are answered; Some of the Gulf’s—indeed, the world’s—most powerful men are here.
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman gets a roar from the crowd. Emir’s father, Hamad bin Khalifa, gets even louder. But nothing compared to the sound it created for the Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani himself, the man who has brought the world in, even if some of that world doesn’t want to be here.
Soon after these immeasurably impressive men take their seats, the stadium lights dim, and the stormy voice of none other than Morgan Freeman fills the cavernous space. He recites some kind of prophetic poem as the footage shows the shark moving through the ocean, circling an unknown object. The metaphor is a little ominous.
And then there he is, walking down the middle of the stadium. Morgan Freeman. in Qatar. And he’s been talking to Qatari YouTube star Ghanim Al Muftah, who was born without his lower limbs, about inclusion and hope and solidarity ahead of the World Cup, which has exposed the exact opposite of what if anything.
It felt like a collective fever dream to the 67,000 people in attendance; The surrealism of this whole dizzying spectacle unfolded in this most unique gathering of men.
The ceremony continues. There are dancing men with swords, mysterious figures twirling white glowing beams, a strange parade of World Cup mascots, headless torsos in all 32 national team jerseys deliberately out of sync with catchy pop songs.
A two-story-tall LIB — the ghostly World Cup mascot — inflates next to the stage, watching silently as Jungkook from K-pop supergroup BTS takes shape on the glistening stage while singing his official FIFA song, Dreamers.
It’s all bright and brilliant and doing what it’s designed to do, though never quite without the shadows that lurk nearby.
Once the music dies down, Emir makes an address. It’s more measured than the odd-hour stroll carried out by FIFA president Gianni Infantino the day before. There is no failed attempt to show sympathy here. It strikes the patient, conciliatory tone that the frustrated Infantino could not, and it is warmly received by his admiring public.
A video then appears on the stadium’s big screen; A home video, it turns out, of Amir and his father playing soccer barefoot in the sand.
The shirts they wear in the video – a replica of which is included in gift bags for every seat in the stadium – are then brought to Emir and his father.
The image of an elderly man fumbling around with a sharpie pen while trying to sign his name on a cloth, just a few feet away from the pockets of loud, sweaty, paying football fans, is one of the tournament’s many uncomfortable associations. It’s a reminder, primarily, perhaps, of the distance between those who run the game and those who consume it.
After a flurry of lasers and fireworks, the ceremony came to an end, and the stadium lights put the football part of this whole thing back into view. Because there is still, after all of this, some real football to be played, even in these most surreal of conditions.
So Qatar and Ecuador line up and pull their shoulders back as their anthems march around the stands. Huge banners of each flag flutter on the grass like a giant World Cup trophy, filled with nothing but air, glimmering in the cold, white light of the stadium.
The teams square off, the referee blows his whistle and the first ball of this tough, dazzling tournament starts rolling, the rest of the world watching red, without blinking, to see what happens next.
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