This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

That is the sound of exactly 2008 drummers pounding away in perfect

synchronicity during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.

The entire stadium pitched into darkness

as the traditional Chinese faux drums glowed from within.

It was just the start of a ceremony widely regarded as the most elaborate in Olympic history,

and it was all designed and executed perfectly.

But behind the scenes there was one small hitch in the coverage of the event that went mostly on reported.

Best producer Daniel Seymour.

During the parade of nations, Greece, as the birthplace of the Olympics, entered first.

That's a longstanding tradition.

But then the rest of the teams came out according to the number of strokes in the Chinese characters that comprise their name.

The country of Jamaica, for example, was followed by Belgium.

Then came Van Nuwatu, which in turn was followed by Israel. The U.S. team walked out somewhere in the middle. My home country of Australia was right at the back,

200 and second in line.

Ultimately, the sequence of nations was just a small detail.

In a four hour, $300 million ceremony, it should not have been the hard part.

But for the Western networks covering the games, the parade proved a little tricky.

Because it seems to us perfectly natural that the teams march in an alphabetical order.

That's Judith Flanders, author of a place for everything, a book about the order of the Latin

alphabet.

So it made all of the Western networks scramble because they simply didn't know when their

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