We know that this section is devoted to watching artistic accomplishments on the stage and screen or hanging on the walls of a gallery, and we also profile ways for people to get outside and be active themselves. This week’s Out of Town feature can be considered a hybrid of the two — getting outside the house and enjoying others engage in an activity that, at its best, can be artistry in motion. This weekend and in the weeks to come, locals will have the opportunity to gather at Paramount Theatre in Rutland and watch some of the greatest athletes in the world play “The Beautiful Game,” as it is called in Brazil.
The Paramount will broadcast select 2018 FIFA World Cup soccer matches from multiple locations in Russia. The first scheduled broadcasts cover selected matches from the first round of play and two consecutive days from the Round of 16. On Sunday, June 17, the theater will open its doors at 10:30 a.m. for an 11 a.m. start for the game pitting Mexico vs. defending World Cup Champion Germany, which won the whole enchilada in Brazil in 2014. First round games will continue with England vs. Belgium on Thursday, June 28, kicking off at 2 p.m. The theater has also scheduled viewings of games on Saturday, June 30, and Sunday, July 1 — teams to be determined.
The FIFA World Cup, often simply called the World Cup, is an international association football competition contested by the national teams of the members of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the sport’s global governing body. The championship has been awarded every four years since the inaugural tournament in 1930, except in 1942 and 1946 when it was not held because of the Second World War.
The FIFA World Cup is the most prestigious association football tournament and most widely viewed and followed sporting event in the world, exceeding even the Olympic Games. The cumulative audience of all matches of the 2006 FIFA World Cup was estimated to be 26.29 billion with an estimated 715.1 million people watching the final match, a ninth of the entire population of the planet.
“We are proud and happy to be able to offer this world-wide tournament of supreme athletic prowess free of charge to the greater community,” said Bruce Bouchard, executive director of The Paramount. “Free Films and Sports Live in HD amounts to 25 percent of our programming and moves ‘A Theatre for Everyone’ to the center of our mission. Ironically, when we were first testing our new projector in the fall of 2013, the first image up was a soccer match in Germany and hence was born Sports Live in HD, which has brought 66 sporting events to thousands of area residents over the past four and a half years.”
The games will be shown on the big screen at The Paramount.
“The giant image in HD illuminates the beauty of the pitch and helps to better understand the geometry of the game,” Bouchard said.