Rain soaked 300,000 spectators on the banks of the Seine on Friday night, and Paris carried on regardless. The city was staging the first Olympic opening ceremony held on a river, the centerpiece of a $9 billion Games.
The show ran three hours. More than 200 delegations rode 85 boats along a course of nearly four miles, past stages set up between Notre Dame, the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower. Cancan dancers high-kicked on the embankments. Lady Gaga came down a golden staircase in a cabaret number. Models walked a runway across the Debilly Bridge, and fountains newly built along the river sent water columns skyward as the boats passed. The night ended with a laser show and Celine Dion singing Edith Piaf’s “Hymne a l’Amour” from the Eiffel Tower.
Marie-Jose Perec, who won three Olympic golds in the 1990s, and two-time judo champion Teddy Riner carried the flame to the cauldron. It will hang over the Tuileries Gardens in a hot-air balloon for the length of the Games. Neither was told until the morning of the ceremony, officials said, and the performer list stayed secret until the same day.
What it cost and what it took
Artistic director Thomas Jolly had a $150 million budget for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics and Paralympics. He spent a large share on something no host had tried in 128 years. Floating athletes down the Seine had been part of the city’s bid plan from the start, and it meant a quiet rewrite of Olympic rules that had required athletes to march into a stadium.
Security was the other big bill. President Emmanuel Macron’s government, in turmoil for weeks, had to mount the biggest peacetime security operation in French history. Hours before the ceremony, saboteurs burned and cut railway lines in a coordinated attack that paralysed the high-speed train network.
Macron told reporters at the Elysee Palace this week that the idea first struck him as “a crazy and not very serious idea.” Paris 2024 chief executive Tony Estanguet said the organizers had set out “going where people weren’t expecting us”. His line for the day: “Our hallmark will be audacity.”
Rain, ponchos and a shrug
Nobody had planned for hours of rain on a summer river show. Dancers in makeup grinned through it, BMX riders still did tricks on a floating barge, and athletes wore plastic ponchos that no postcard would have chosen. As night fell, performers danced and voguing through the downpour while barges lit up.
“There is a long love story between France and the Games,” Estanguet said on Friday. “And when you love the Games, you don’t get intimidated by a few drops of rain.”
Macron, IOC president Thomas Bach and US first lady Jill Biden watched from a covered VIP stand near the Eiffel Tower.
