The Games of the 33rd Olympiad opened in Paris on Friday night with a spectacular high-wire act.
A fleet of 85 boats carried more than 6,500 athletes along the river Seine, floating past some of Paris’s picture-postcard sites and monuments, before finishing with a mesmerising laser show at the Eiffel Tower.
The city-centre location for the ceremony prompted the biggest peace-time security operation in France’s history, involving 45,000 police and several army units. The day began with arson attacks on France’s rail network, and streets adjacent to the route being sealed off from mid-morning, but it ended with a joyous romp in the mid-summer rain.
After five years of planning and two years of secret rehearsals, the first Olympic opening ceremony not staged in a stadium was executed with native panache. It was a daring cocktail of music, circus, dance, cabaret, cultural touchstones and creative brass neck. When this audacious plan was first mooted, French president Emmanuel Macron was among the sceptics but, in recent days, he surrendered to the Olympic spirit.
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“We decided it was the right moment to deliver this crazy idea and make it real,” he said.
Mr Macron could just as easily have been talking about hosting the event itself.
Every Olympics is the biggest-ever, in a self-perpetuating spiral, and every host city has a crisis of conscience about the cost and the undetermined legacy.
In a recent poll, 44 per cent of Parisians said the Games were “a bad thing”. Local reticence is a common theme in the build-up to every Olympics but, once the Games commence, the mood typically brightens.
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The schedule is so stressed now that women’s football and men’s sevens rugby started two days before the opening ceremony. More than 10,000 athletes from 184 countries will compete in 32 sports over the next fortnight – including, for the first time, break dancing. The host city has, in the tradition of Irish sing-songs, a noble call on the make-up of the schedule. Not coincidentally, France is tipped for gold in men’s and women’s break dancing.
Just like in every modern Olympics, there will be doping scandals and betrayal as a counter weight to the flag-waving delirium and happy tears. There is also no such thing as a peace-time Olympics. The second boat in the opening ceremony parade was for the Refugee Olympic team, a disparate group of 36 displaced athletes from 11 different countries.
Le Monde, in its front-page headline on Friday, reminded its readers that these Games are being staged in the shadow of “geopolitical crises” in Ukraine and Gaza. Russia is still banned. Even at the Olympics, there is a limit to the escapism.
Buckle up. We have lift-off.
