A blazing arrow fired 70 yards across the Montjuic Stadium in Barcelona to light the Olympic flame opened the 25th Games, the most comprehensive gathering of nations and athletes in history. Doves of peace and the sensuous sound of Spanish opera launched the opening ceremony of the biggest and richest Olympics. More than 10,000 athletes from 172 teams began gathering at the hilltop stadium, readying themselves for the 90-minute parade. With the sport getting under way, these will be the first truly competitive Olympics in 32 years, without the boycotts that plagued Moscow and Los Angeles and with the return of a united Germany and a multi-racial South African team. Cuba’s leader Fidel Castro and South Africa’s Nelson Mandela joined King Juan Carlos of Spain to watch a flamboyant display of Latin talent by 20,000 artists. In a poignant reminder of the scourge of Aids that killed rock, giant Freddie Mercury, his voice echoed around the stadium with that of diva Montserrat Caballe in the ‘Barcelona’ theme song.
Other important events:
1894 The Japanese navy defeats a Chinese fleet in Kanghwa Bay, sparking the Sino-Japanese War.
1909 French aviator Louis Bleriot becomes the first person to fly across the English Channel.
1920 French forces occupy Damascus, Syria.
1934 Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss is assassinated in an unsuccessful Nazi coup attempt in Austria.
1943 Benito Mussolini is forced to resign as prime minister of Italy during the Second World War.
1952 Puerto Rico becomes a self-governing commonwealth of the United States.
1956 Italian liner Andrea Doria and Swedish ship Stockholm collide off the coast of North America. Fifty people killed in the accident.
1957 Tunisia becomes independent from France.
1963 The United States, the Soviet Union and Britain conclude treaty prohibiting nuclear testing in the atmosphere, space or under water.
1968 Pope Paul VI bans all artificial birth control methods for Roman Catholics.
1971 Dr Christiaan Barnard transplants two lungs and a heart into a man in Cape Town, South Africa.
1978 The world’s first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, is born in Britain.
1979 Fire guts the entire southern end of the Dnata building, one of Dubai’s showpiece projects.
1984 Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya becomes the first woman to walk in space.
1994 Jordan and Israel seal the end of a 46-year state of war.
1996 Burundi’s Tutsi-dominated army seizes power, ending a power vacuum.
1998 Saudi Arabia and Yemen reach an agreement on the principles of a solution to a border conflict.
1999 Northern Ireland’s Eddie Irvine wins Austrian Grand Prix in Spielberg.
2000 An Air France Concorde travelling to New York crashes into a hotel outside Paris shortly after take-off, killing 113 people.
2002 Floods ravage South Asia, leaving more than seven million homeless and 288 dead in Bangladesh, Nepal and India.
2007 Pratibha Devisingh Patil makes history as she sworn in as India’s first woman president.
2009 Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is declared by Indonesia’s General Election Commission as the new President of the country.
2013 At least 80 people die and 140 are injured after a train derails in north-western Spain.
2016 A knife-wielding man goes on the rampage at a Japanese care centre for the mentally disabled in Sagamihara, killing at least 19 people.
