Paris
Olympic Games opening ceremony: a high-kitsch, riverside spectacle
An armada of
boats carrying athletes along the Seine, dangling dancers and parading drag
queens – all under torrential rain
Angelique
Chrisafis in Paris
Sat 27 Jul
2024 00.18 CEST
The Paris
Olympic Games opened on Friday night with a high-kitsch, riverside spectacle,
as an armada of boats carried athletes along the Seine, dancers dangled from
high poles, drag queens paraded on bridges and the Olympic rings lit up the
Eiffel Tower – all under unrelenting, torrential rain.
France had
promised its opening ceremony would be the biggest open-air show on Earth. More
than 300,000 people watched from the riverside and bridges – and hundreds more
stood at windows and balconies – as a show of dance, live music and acrobatics
unfolded along more than 6km of river from the Pont d’Austerlitz to the Eiffel
Tower.
The show had
promised to light-heartedly deconstruct French stereotypes, and the US singer
Lady Gaga was the first star to set the tone for a tongue-in-cheek kitsch
spectacle. She appeared from a giant golden staircase on the edge of the Seine
surrounded by pink pompoms and giant pink feather fans, for a high-kicking
cabaret performance of France’s famous 1960s music-hall number Mon Truc en
plumes by Zizi Jeanmaire.
Later the
pop singer Aya Nakamura, the most-listened to French-speaking artist in the
world, stepped on to the Pont des Arts in a bold musical juxtaposition that saw
her perform with France’s Republican Guard, who were in perfect formation on
military drums. Nakamura sang extracts of songs by the legendary French crooner
Charles Aznavour, as well as her own hits, Pookie and Djadja, with the French
army choir and military brass band.
Nakamura’s
presence was considered a triumph after a racist backlash against the prospect
of her singing had prompted the Paris prosecutor to open an investigation into
alleged racist abuse against her earlier this year. Some on the French far
right – which was held back from taking power by a massive surge of tactical
voting in the recent snap parliament election – had complained earlier this
year that Nakamura, who grew up in the Paris suburbs, was not French enough to
perform.
Paris’s
rain-soaked river party was the first time the opening ceremony of the world’s
biggest sporting event had taken place outside a stadium, with athletes
parading not around an athletics track but in a flotilla of boats.
But the
outdoor ceremony, once described by Emmanuel Macron as “a crazy idea that must
be made real”, had to overcome obstacles.
First, a
series of sabotage attacks on the high-speed TGV rail network caused travel
chaos across France hours before the ceremony began. Then came a weather
nightmare: instead of the soft summer evening light that directors had hoped
for, there was a deluge as the skies opened with such relentless rain that
weather forecasters said it was the equivalent of 15 days’ rainfall in six
hours.
Rain
thoroughly soaked athletes and spectators, many of whom were outside with no
cover for the entire show, which lasted almost four hours. Even some
dignitaries temporarily left their seats in the tribune at Trocadero after
getting drenched.
But it was
all about determination in the face of adversity. Thomas Jolly, the young
French director who created the surreal and irreverent show, had said he did
not want just “ephemeral glitz” but an exploration of what underpins “our
shared humanity”.
He said he
chose the Seine for its “power to heal” from tragedies such as Paris’s 2015
terrorist attacks, as well as the 2019 fire at Notre Dame. Indeed, part of the
show was a spectacular pre-filmed dance routine of workers performing high-risk
moves while hanging off the scaffolding around Notre Dame.
The evening
began with 6,800 athletes bussed from the Olympic Village to Pont d’Austerlitz
in the east of the city, where the French military guarded them as they climbed
on to boats.
Greece’s
boat set out first, in the Olympic tradition, followed by the Olympic refugee
team, then other nations sailed down the river on 85 boats. The Ukrainian
delegation received a massive ovation from the crowd on the riverside.
Not since
the time of Louis XV has a ceremony seen a formation of boats sailing the same
direction down the Seine, and it was cheered on by people hanging from windows.
The
Technicolor homage to French cliches included a woman in a dress covered in
croissants leading a colourful crowd towards a group of French can-can dancers
in bright pink outfits. They delivered a traditional skirt-shaking,
leg-spinning can-can performance, before ending in the splits on the edge of
the Seine.
The Paris
mayor, Anne Hidalgo, had called the show “joyous, creative and not very well
behaved”.
In a nod to
the sheeting rain, hundreds of dancers splashed in a synchronised dance routine
through troughs of water in a dramatic show on the Île de la Cité, near Notre
Dame. Dancers dressed as hotel bell-boys then performed acrobatics on a bridge
after transporting Louis Vuitton suitcases – the obligatory nod to sponsors.
France’s biggest death metal band, Gojira, performed amid shooting flames with
the lyric singer Marina Viotti, and dancers swung from poles over the Pont
Neuf.
Axelle
Saint-Cirel, a French mezzo-soprano from Guadeloupe, sang a new arrangement of
the French national anthem, La Marseillaise, draped in the tricolour flag on
the glass roof of the Grand Palais.
All this
time a mysterious, faceless figure was darting across the rooftops of the city
with the Olympic flame. At least one billion viewers were watching on TV and
social media, and the filmed segments were just as important as the live
performance, with France’s former football star Zinedine Zidane kicking off by
carrying the Olympic flame through a film set of kitsch 1960s cafe terraces on
to a Métro train. He arrived to cheers at the Trocadero.
The show,
which culminated at the Eiffel Tower, took place amid an unprecedented security
operation in the city, with 45,000 police officers and thousands of soldiers.
Tony
Estanguet, the three-time Olympic canoe champion who is the Paris Olympics’
chief organiser, told the athletes: “Welcome to your moment in history – live
it and love it.”
At the end,
Charles Coste, the oldest French Olympic champion at 100, took the flame from
his wheelchair, then passed it on to French judo great Teddy Riner and sprinter
Marie-José Pérec. They lit a cauldron attached to a giant balloon, before
Celine Dion sang Edith Piaf’s Hymn to Love, in her first public performance in
years, drawing huge cheers from the crowd.
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