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Basketball referees Peter Murray and Peter Downie are quite used to being accused of being blind. This they ignore. Accusations of deafness are a different matter.

Deaf people are angered and disappointed by the threat facing the TV show News Review.

Kiwis were the friendliest people on Earth, the president of the International Silent Sport, Mr Jerald Jordan, told the opening of the sixteenth World Games for the Deaf on Saturday.

The Games will be about the same size as the 1974 sporting extravaganza in Christchurch, the Commonwealth Games. Yet it has been orchestrated on a budget of $700,000 – about one-third of the cost of the opening ceremony planned for the 1990 Commonwealth Games in Auckland.

The starting equipment to be used at the Queen Elizabeth II complex is far more sophisticated. It uses a traffic-light type devised by a Christchurch man, Mr Ted Gilliver.

Nearly 90 Christchurch people have spent the last year training to be interpreters at the World Games for the Deaf, with about 50 deaf people teaching the volunteers their language.

The vice-chairman of the organising committee, Mrs Margaret Coutts, said yesterday "for two weeks there will be more deaf people on the street than hearing people. My heart is filled with gold because of the very big turn out – there are more athletes here than at the previous World Games in America (in 1985)."

Deaf people can communicate country to country with more ease than those who can speak. It is not because they have an international sign language – each country has its own – but because it is a visual language.

About 100 interpreters have been trained in Christchurch over the last year. The classes were organised by the hearing people but the deaf were the teachers. It is only the second time that New Zealand sign language has been taught in this country.

A crowd of 4000 cheered and waved as about 1400 athletes and officials resplendent in national colours marched into the stadium as a reminder that the first World Games for the Deaf were held in Paris in 1924.