Olympic Opening Ceremonies 2022: Top Moments, Reaction You Might've Missed

The 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing officially kicked off Friday with an Opening Ceremony from the National Stadium that featured no celebrity appearances and several missing delegations amid a diplomatic boycott over alleged human rights violations.

The ceremony was dialed back due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it emphasized the theme of togetherness at a time when the world feels very much apart, with spectacle attempting to mask political agendas.

Nothing represented the theme better than a massive set of lights shaped like a snowflake surrounding the Olympic flame, the names of each participating country inside of it.

The size of the flame in relation to the surrounding snowflake "cauldron" drew a few jokes across social media, too.

The flame was lit by Chinese athletes Zhao Jiawen and Dinigeer Yilamujiang, the latter "an Uyghur cross-country skiier from the western Chinese region of Xinjiang," whose participation created controversy with the Uyghur community in China being one of several groups the government has been accused of persecuting.

Team USA entered the ceremony led by curler and 2018 gold medalist John Shuster and speed skater Brittany Bowe. Bowe replaced bobsledder Elana Meyers Taylor, who tested positive for COVID-19, per The New York Times. Shuster and the United States are expected to contend for a repeat victory, though Canada will be a tough out in a sport it has long dominated. Floridian Bowe is a former inline skater who has made the successful transition into speedskating, evolving into one of the best in the world.

The United States was one of the larger contingencies to participate in the ceremony, with a somewhat surprising 175 marchers, per Juliet Macur of The New York Times. The site's Daniel Victor reported that is about 80 percent of athletes and a "notably high percentage."

The host country entered the venue to the loudest reaction of the night, led by speed skater Gao Tingyu and skeleton athlete Zhao Dan. Tingyu won a bronze medal in 2018, becoming the first male Chinese speedskater to ever medal in the Games.

Nathan Crumpton of American Samoa stole the show, arriving shirtless in subzero temperatures.

Crumpton is the sole competitor from American Samoa, a skeleton skater who shrugged off the freezing temperatures by arriving in a lavalava and flip-flops, proudly displaying the flag of the American territory. Tongan athlete Pita Taufatofua (taekwondo) made headlines in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 for his shirtless arrival at that opening ceremony.

He took to Twitter to show his kudos to Crumpton.

The ceremony, for all its grandiosity, remained relatively demure given the lower number of participating athletes, lack of worldwide leaders and ongoing political and health concerns.