PARIS 2024'S NOVEL OPENING CEREMONY WAS WELL-INTENTIONED BUT LONDON 2012 IT WAS NOT... SOMETIMES YOU CANNOT BEAT A STADIUM, WRITES IAN HERBERT

The 2024 Olympics officially opened following a ceremony on the Seine
Athletes paraded down the river instead of in a traditional stadium setting
Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony: Follow all the reaction

There had been a warning to France, right back when it was taking over the flame, that you can’t simply conjure up Olympic magnificence.

For the Tokyo closing ceremony three years ago, plans were laid to beam a live feed of the Tricolor being hoisted up the Eiffel Tower. The idea was abandoned because the weather in Paris was so foul.

The slate grey skies did their worst again on a night in which the host city’s attempts to be different, bringing the athletes up the River Seine in a flotilla of 85 boats as interpretive dance took place on the banks, ultimately proved that you just can’t beat a stadium for an event like this.

The night had its moments. Zinedine Zidane filmed in Bond mode, with the Marseillaise briefly playing, carrying the torch into the Metro system. A sassy Lady Gaga performing an Edith Piaf number near Pont d’Austerlitz. A memorable can-can by people in pink poppy costumes. But as the torch was carried on by a rather terrifying-looking bearer who had no face, the rain tipped down on the Eiffel Tower stages where the athletes eventually emerged from their flotilla. People in soulless, temporary stands watched their progression on four TV screens, one of which succumbed to the rain.

It was all well-intentioned. Take the Games out into a city in need of an Olympic spirit and optimism after 10 years which have seen terrorist attacks kill 129 people, fire devastate Notre Dame, and the pandemic. ‘Paris is back on its feet, jubilant, flamboyant, creative and open,’ explained the ceremony’s orchestrator, Thomas Jolly.

But even in Tokyo, where the heartbreaking last ceremony of this kind took place in emptiness, the sight of Naomi Osaka stepping up illuminated steps to light the Olympic torch was spiritual. Being a flag bearer is just not the same on a slow-moving boat as taking the applause while walking the stadium perimeter, though Britain’s Tom Daley and Helen Glover made the best of it. Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro or London 2012 it was not.

The weather seemed to sum up the week and day it had been here. This long-awaited day for France dawned to news of sabotage attacks inflicting havoc on the high-speed rail network. Police have had every inch of the city’s central areas covered but this co-ordinated attack showed there will always be vulnerabilities.

The armed police and their blue vans have dominated the foreground of the wonderful image of Nadia Comaneci performing at Montreal at the 1976 Games, one of many Instants des Jeux Olympiques dotted around the Tuileries. As Le Monde put it earlier this week, Paris is ‘the Olympic capital of a tense, fragmented world’.

Ukraine wants Russia banned. Palestine wants Israel banned. The Israeli team will be among the most protected throughout here. The trauma of the Munich Games in 1972, when Israelis were taken hostage and murdered by the Palestinian group Black September, is so keenly remembered.

A ceremony was designed to symbolise peace and reconciliation. Sequana, goddess of the Seine, ‘evokes the feminine force of resistance to violence and a desire for emancipation and freedom’, they told us. There was rain on the parade. But the forecast is fine and the Games — with their exquisite arenas, their beautiful and historic backdrops and stars waiting to be crowned — will now take over. For a brief and unscripted time, the clouds will clear.

2024-07-26T23:24:46Z dg43tfdfdgfd