OMGAD Welcome Ceremony
Masters are built, not born
Masters aren't born. They're built.
The Open Masters Games Abu Dhabi 2026 is the region’s largest mass participation sporting event – ten days of competition across 38 disciplines, for athletes aged 30 and over.
We were appointed to create and deliver the Welcome Ceremony at Zayed Sports City Stadium: a show built to launch the Games, honour lifelong sport, and hold its own for a stadium crowd and a global broadcast audience.
We built the ceremony around two athletes – the Original and the Modern – connected by the same instinct to keep moving.
One belongs to survival: the hunt, the journey, the body tested by necessity. The other belongs to training plans, personal bests, and the discipline of showing up at 45, 60, 70.
We moved between the two through heritage and contemporary performance, letting the story travel from tradition into what comes next, without ever losing the thread.
A high-impact arrival sequence opened the show and set the pace for the stadium. From there, the narrative travelled through place, heritage and ritual before landing in the pulse of modern training and endurance.
Every tempo shift and piece of staging was designed to read two ways at once – as spectacle for 25,000 people inside the stadium, and as clarity for the cameras carrying it further.
The emotional centre never left the athletes themselves: their perseverance, their quiet milestones, the years spent working toward a mastery nobody was watching.
It closed with a performance from Leona Lewis, Rita Ora, Carole Samaha and Rashed Al Nuaimi – one stage, four voices, the same story landing at once in Arabic and English, in heritage and in music.
The ceremony welcomed competitors from around the world and set the tone for ten days of competition across Abu Dhabi.
Built for stadium scale and rooted in heritage, it turned a mass participation event into a shared act of belief – in community, in resilience, in the long, unglamorous work of getting better at something. Designed for broadcast, it gave the Games a local pulse no studio could fake.
25,000 athletes. 38 sports. One shared instinct to keep moving.
