Standing in the rain, on a barge on the Seine, waiting to be part of the Opening Ceremony for the Paris Olympics, American sprinter Noah Lyles was already talking about his desire to rewatch the entire launch, presumably from a warm and dry place.
“I just love seeing moments made,” explained Lyles, an absurdly charismatic figure on the verge of global ubiquity.
Lyles will get a kick out of the Paris opening when he gets around to his rewatch, especially if he’s watching on a service with a fast-forward button.
Your typical Olympics Opening Ceremony represents a desperate and wildly expensive struggle to deliver one or two moments that people will be talking about for the following two weeks, if not for years to come. Masterminded by artistic director Thomas Jolly, the Opening Ceremony from Paris provided possibly dozens of wild, visually stunning and even emotional moments. I’d say the moments came “one after another,” but that doesn’t capture the deliberate pace of what ended up being a four-hour marvel.
The tradition, which frankly makes a lot of sense in 99.9 percent of cases, is to hold the Opening Ceremony in the primary Olympic venue, home to multiple competitions and the ceremonial Olympic cauldron. You can put tens of thousands of people in one stadium and give every one of those attendees a uniform experience, one shared usually by the viewers at home. The presentations focus on the culture and national personality of the host country, but a stadium is a stadium is a stadium.
Jolly and the French organizers said, “Nah. Screw that. We’ll always have Paris.”
The Parade of Nations, usually an endless procession around a track, became an armada of yachts and barges and powerboats progressing down four miles of the Seine. The boats passed the Mint, which was showcased for its role in producing the Olympic medals for this installment, and Notre-Dame Cathedral, which rang its bells for the first time since the 2019 fire. Bridges became red carpet fashion shows, stationary floats became musical venues or the gardens of Versailles (complete with bike stunts).
The Eiffel Tower was the site of a temporary stadium where the torch was collected and taken to another boat, which then went back down the Seine, with the torchbearers progressing through the Louvre courtyard and across the Tuileries Garden, where a hot air balloon was the unique cauldron of choice.
At some point, Mike Tirico, part of the NBC announcing crew with Kelly Clarkson and Peyton Manning, mentioned how many famously iconic Parisian landmarks hadn’t been part of the ceremony, but… like… how many hours did anybody have available? I’m not sure how many other cities in the world would even consider this sort of geography-spanning approach to an Opening Ceremony — Rome and Athens could do a comparable cavalcade of landmarks, I suppose? — but none would be wise to.
This was an Opening Ceremony designed for television. I’m sure people watching along the Seine had fantastic experiences — leaving aside the rain — but if you faced the inconveniences to be physically present, you didn’t see everything. It is, in fact, possible that you saw almost none of the individual entertainments along the way, at least not with your own eyes.
I can’t speak to what screens were set up along the way or how many people were streaming the event on their phones, but a small geographic patch of attendees had the right view for the live experience of Lady Gaga and her rendition of “Mon Truc En Plume,” a few more got to witness the bridge fashion show and a few more saw Celine Dion bring down the maison with a climactic Edith Piaf cover. Cumulatively, my view on my couch, and your view on yours, was better than anything that any one person got in Paris.
[There’s something to be said about how this televisual approach to the opening prioritized the global audience and excluded actual Parisians, tied into reports of how poorly authorities have treated locals, especially unhoused locals, in recent weeks. You had to have the patience of Job or the wealth of Croesus to have a front-row seat and if you have the wealth of Croesus, you may not have enjoyed the whimsically gory segment dedicated to the executions of French nobility.]
The live performances, somehow given death-defying stakes — and evocative visual texture, which only grew as darkness fell on the City of Lights — thanks to slippery stages and limited rehearsal time, were mostly outrageous and excellent.
Gaga, playful and sassy and perfect as the opening to the Opening, was thoroughly entertaining but, if we’re being honest, a little small. A dozen people with only limited choreography on a bend in the Seine. I’m not sure I even would have wanted to witness it live.
I’m not sure you could have possibly gotten a full live feel for my favorite performance of the evening, French mezzo-soprano Axelle Saint-Cirel wailing the “La Marseillaise” from a rooftop, holding a flag, in the pouring rain. Nor can I imagine there was any place where you could see Mali-born French superstar Aya Nakamura, in her glorious golden fringe.
Not all the performances were perfect. A line of can-can dancers was perched precariously on the edge of the Seine and I’m not sure if they simply surrendered their choreography because of the dangers of high-kicking on soaking concrete or if they were always there just as a goof. But as my pal Linda Holmes cracked on Bluesky: “This can-can has a bit of can’t-can’t mixed in, and I say that as a person who definitely couldn’t-couldn’t.”
What was remarkable was how the ceremony just kept delivering one breathtaking idea after another. The image of the metallic horse, carrying a knight bearing the Olympic flag, soaring down the Seine on some wild underwater apparatus — or maybe just borne on the back of Lilith, the shark from Under Paris — will stick with me forever. The wildly inclusive fashion show on the bridge — models of all ages, sizes, races and places on the gender spectrum — was a total delight.
Any time there was a lull, and sometimes even when there was no lull, at the expense of exposure for smaller countries in the Parade of Nations, there were filmed segments.
Ultimately, the Masked Torch Bearer, who collected the ceremonial torch from a group of children to whom it was passed by soccer legend Zinedine Zidane, served very little purpose. In the moment, though, as they ran through the Louvre and did parkour across slippery rooftops and even took a zipline from building to building, it was a blast.
A filmed tribute to French storytelling and cinema, including The Little Prince, an homage to Georges Méliès’ Le voyage dans la lune and a nod to the original 1968 movie version of Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes was great. The decision to conclude the tribute with several minutes of Minions was not.
The well-choreographed Stomp-style dance outside of the Mint was also great. The decision to precede it with a Louis Vuitton commercial was not.
In the middle of the technical and logistical nightmare of the live components, though, I understand why filmed material, filler and otherwise, was necessary.
If I’m tiptoeing into negativity regarding a ceremony that I admired tremendously, the biggest source of frustration was, as always, NBC’s coverage.
Reliably jingoistic, the NBC crew did a spectacular job showcasing many aspects of the American contingent, including great interviews with Lyles and drenched flagbearers LeBron James and Coco Gauff — “Après LeBron, le déluge” — and a very funny interview with Joel Embiid, who was happy to converse from one of the American barge’s indoor spaces.
No other country received similar treatment and no other country was treated as anything other than a secondary concern. Tirico said early-on that the Paris presentation didn’t lend itself to the global trivia that accompanies the Parade of Nations. Fair enough, but instead of that trivia, which I always found to be useful, Tirico, Manning and Clarkson too often contributed absolutely nothing. Tirico was bland, Manning prone to anxiously filling dead air and Clarkson, after bringing her trademark giddiness to the first hour, was nearly silent for the rest until Dion reduced her (and countless others) to tears.
It’s one thing not to offer trivia. Fine. I can research that Eswatini is the country that used to be Swaziland.
It’s one thing to avoid politics other than very fleeting mentions of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It’s another to fail to identify at least half the singers, rappers and performers who were so integral to the event. Those singers received, at most, a token verbal acknowledgment. Why not a chyron in the lower corner giving viewers with genuine curiosity the chance to google the details the paid announcing crew was unable to provide? And why not put some of those pieces of trivia that normally anchor the Parade of Nations in chyrons?
The way I see it, you have two broadcasting choices: You can go without announcers (or go announcer-lite) like coverage in much of the rest of the world, letting audiences experience the Opening Ceremony in objective, unguided form. Or, if you need announcers, make sure they have the information to provide a service beyond American cheerleading (at least get announcers capable of making a Jules et Jim reference during a segment dedicated to the French art of the threesome).
But enough complaints and back to kudos for Jolly and the Paris organizers. However the rest of the Olympics go, the Opening Ceremony was a spectacle of the highest (and longest) order.
And nobody got eaten by the sharks in the Seine.