Good afternoon and welcome to our live coverage of the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony from Birmingham.
As you’d expect, tonight’s acts have a distinctly local flavour, with Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight producing the show and featuring bands including Duran Duran and Black Sabbath.
Over the next 11 days, more than 5,000 athletes from 72 nations will compete in 280 events across 19 sports. Cyclist Laura Kenny and swimmer Adam Peaty will be some of the main attractions for the home crowd, as will newly crowned world 100m champion Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce of Jamaica.
Games organizers say they are on track for record ticket sales for the Commonwealth Games.
We are on track as we sit here today to be the biggest Commonwealth Games in the UK, certainly in terms of ticket sales,” said local organizing committee chief executive Ian Reid.
“We’ve recently passed the last edition (on the Gold Coast) and I think this morning’s report puts us pretty close to 1.3 million tickets sold and in the next few days we should have passed the Glasgow ticket sales (2014) too.
“There’s certainly a lot of appetite in the city. We have one of the biggest sporting programs, so not every session is sold out, but history would tell us that there will be a huge take-up of tickets during the event itself, both online and through multiple lockers.
“So hopefully we’ll have capacity or near capacity for most sports.”
The host nation’s medal hopes were dealt a blow on Wednesday when sprinter Dina Asher-Smith withdrew from the Games.
Asher-Smith had broken her British record to finish fourth in the world 100m final last week and won a bronze medal in the 200m.
But the 26-year-old pulled up during the 4x100m relay with a hamstring injury which forced her to miss out.