Culture : For Many, Olympics is the Place to Show : The opening ceremonies give each nation, no matter how small, a chance to march as an equal among equals at the Games.

It may distract puritans among the international coaching fraternity as they nurse athletes through a tense fortnight of Spanish summer, but in creating the modern Olympics, fun was mandated as part of the Games.

“It is primarily through the ceremonies that the Olympiad must distinguish itself from a mere series of world championships,” French Baron Pierre de Coubertin, inventor of the modern Olympics, wrote early in this century.

That explains why Australian director Ric Birch finds himself in Barcelona this summer with an unathletic stopwatch of his own. Under Birch, an international cast is creating the latest word in elaborate and expensive ceremonies that have become the trademark of successive Olympiads.

By now, the farsighted old baron would be pleased to know, the opening and closing ceremonies are as important as the Games themselves. Just as they are a five-ring appeal for international brotherhood, so are they the host nation’s calling card to the world.

At every recent Olympics, it has been the same story: The opening and closing ceremonies are the toughest tickets, and they attract the largest television audiences. What’s it all mean? Are Olympics about sports? Or show biz?

John MacAloon, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, notes that only about one-quarter of the nations participating will see their flag raised or hear their anthem played as a result of winning in the competitions.

“The fact is that marching in the parade of nations, as a nation among nations, is what is most important to many, perhaps the majority of countries in attendance,” MacAloon writes in a book of essays distributed by the Center of Olympic Studies, a special department created at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. In the opening ceremonies at least, all nations are “equally visible, equally valuable, equally ‘Olympic.’ ”

Miquel de Moragas, director of the university center, observes in a new book on the Games that the ceremonies have become steadily larger and more elaborate since the modern Games began at De Coubertin’s inspiration in 1896 in Athens.

Athletes paraded for the first time in London in 1908. They swore the Olympic oath for the first time in 1920 in Antwerp. The torch was carried into the Olympic stadium for the first time in 1928 in Amsterdam. Yet in 1960 in Rome, the opening ceremony was still more protocol than spectacle.

The ceremonies went hi-tech for the first time in 1964 in Tokyo with an opening show that lasted nearly two hours: 8,000 doves and 12,000 balloons. It’s been growing ever since, although Birch, who was also director of production under David Wolper for the 1984 Los Angeles Games, says the benchmark came in Moscow in 1980. That’s when the Soviet Union put 25,000 superbly trained performers on the floor of the Olympic stadium under Bolshoi directors for a socko three-hour spectacular.

By now, MacAloon says, “both present audiences and Olympic tradition have come to expect a dramatic and evocative display of . . . what the host city and nation most want to communicate about themselves.” The ceremonies are also indicative “of how much energy and imagination the host country has invested in the Olympics,” MacAloon says, and how successful they are likely to be.

The hi-tech Barcelona extravaganza features 8,500 performers, 172 national flags, a parade of 11,657 athletes and officials, 65,000 spectator-participants in the Olympic Stadium, 137 television cameras and a $20-million budget--double the 1984 cost. The International Olympic Committee foots the bill.

British, Greek, American and Japanese composers ranging from Andrew Lloyd Webber to Angelo Badalamanti have written new music for the shows. Spain will provide arpeggios of opera stars: Jose Carreras, Placido Domingo, Montserrat Caballe and Alfredo Kraus singing the Olympic hymn to the music of a 100-piece orchestra.

There will be a fanfare for 80 tenoras, Catalan woodwinds that look like oboes, and an 18-minute Olympic concerto by composer Ryuichi Sakamato. The showstopper stage for Montjuic Stadium was designed in Spain and built in Switzerland. Lighting effects have come from the United States, France, Germany and Britain for lighting director Marc Brickman, who staged Pink Floyd and Bruce Springsteen.

Show details are secret, although the look isn’t: It will reflect Catalonia’s avant-garde artistic spirit. Barcelona is capital of a Belgium-sized region that spawned painters Picasso, Miro and Dali and modernist architects like surrealist wizard Antoni Gaudi. The show’s flavor-- Ole!-- will be as Spanish as the flamenco. There will be no bull, alas, but no shortage of well-guarded doves.

(As a symbol of peace, doves are almost synonymous with the Olympics, but they need guidance. Some doves released in Seoul in 1988 took refuge in a dark and inviting funnel high above the stadium, only to roast tragically when the Olympic flame was ignited. Birch says the Barcelona flame funnel has an ultrasound barrier to discourage birds.)

Of energy and imagination, there is no limit in Barcelona, says Birch, whose official title is executive producer for the ceremonies. More than 100,000 people signed up to work as volunteers in all phases of the Olympics.

“We were warned that it would be anarchic but on the contrary: The volunteers have been quick learners, attentive and disciplined,” notes Birch.

The show itself, he says, will contrast with the joyless precision of Moscow and the “laid back, hokey but intrinsically honest” Los Angeles shows. “I think the impression at the end will be one of color, a bright kaleidoscope of people.

“In Los Angeles, it was an all-American show. Here it’s more cosmopolitan; we’re bringing in people from all over,” says Birch. Also, “in L.A. we didn’t take as many chances. People there know show business. Here, we are taking chances with costumes, props and effects. If an idea is complicated or not 100% achievable, it doesn’t seem to scare anyone here. They go at it with passion. . . . If you believe enough, it will happen.”

Birch says the show is designed to be both Spanish and Catalan to flatter both national and regional sensibilities. An early script called for a dove to fly onto the horns of a bull there in the stadium. A symbolic juxtaposition of peace and national strength.

But Birch says that letters from anti-bullfight advocates began reaching Olympic officials, and the word came down: Cut the bull.

“Now I can say how fabulous it would have been without having to worry about the confrontation of a ton-and-a-half bull with a bunch of 14-year-old gymnasts,” Birch smiles.