Paris 2024, Day 1

A frantic Opening Ceremony

Photo by Yuta Koike on Unsplash

Last month, I was in Paris for a short weekend. At dinner one evening, a friend and I struck up a conversation with a couple sitting at the same communal table, and it was in this conversation that I first heard that the Opening Ceremony for these Games was going to involve barges down the Seine. I couldn’t quite figure out how that might work. Then I learned that there was no rehearsal. And now we know how it went: impressive, especially for the lack of rehearsal, and frantic.

When it comes to the foundations of modern sport, there are two countries are most responsible. Britain would seem to have been the most involved.  Victorians developed rugby and football, established the codes distinguishing them, and then spread them, as well as cricket and other sports, around the world. Offshoots of those also took the name of football in the US and Australia. (And we have to clarify: Canadians, Australians, and Americans use the word “soccer,” a short version of the official name “association football,” because that was the word the British used for quite some time, leaving the word “football” available in the English language.) Sports were seen as important training for colonial officials, and the British took them to the colonies as their own preferred pastimes and as tools to train colonial subjects in narrowly-defined British values. 

If the French didn’t create as many of the major sports, the most important international sports competitions were their inventions. Baron de Coubertin created a modern version of ancient Greece’s Olympics. White supremacy was at the heart from the beginning. As Laurent Dubois points out in Soccer Empire, Coubertin worried about what might happen if the “dominated race” ever defeated the “dominant race” (26-27). Jules Rimet established the World Cup, which began in 1930 in Uruguay. These competitions were as imperial as Britain’s use of sports. Their purpose was to be a celebration of European civilization. 

Highlights

• The very beginning with Zinedine Zidane was more in the London 2012 vein of “not taking ourselves too seriously” than I expected. Watching Zizou stuck in the metro and handing the torch off to a group of three children was very adorable.

• The barges are absolutely frantic. The first multi-country barge had Hazel Irvine racing through a barrage of details for the delegations of Afghanistan, South Africa, Albania, Algeria, and Germany. Jamaica was on screen for maybe 3 seconds. In fact, it’s so frantic that it’s nearly impossible to really see the national costumes. I also am baffled by the decision to put Australia and the US next to last. Did I miss China’s barge? And sorry, the United States barge was utterly epic: hundreds of us packed onto that boat and at the helm, Lebron James and Coco Gauff. (I don’t always love the perennial Ralph Lauren outfits, but these were sleek.)

• Despite the weather, the Mongolian team outfits, which went viral, still stunned. The way the fabric falls is immaculate.

• So many legends are either bowing out after this Games or are imminently ending their careers: Andy Murray, Marta, and (my heart can’t take this) Rafa Nadal.

• Michael Phelps rocks a man bun now.

• We are all going to be seated for the new event called kayak cross, right?

• “Great Britain and Northern Ireland” rather than “the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” is a choice. One that put it right before Guam, which the commentators correctly tell us is an unincorporated territory.

• Hazel Irvine (who is so underrated) and Andrew Cotter do a pretty decent (if at times euphemistic) job of referencing the vast colonial histories that connect half of these countries to Europe in one way or another. They are also rightly precise about the US’s unincorporated territories, down to informing us that Denmark sold the Virgin Islands to the United States for $25 million. Cotter let that horror hang for a second.

• There was a glorious mashup of metal and Bizet. A comparison to the last one of these summer opening ceremonies held in Europe: it’s striking that the London 2012 ceremony’s history runthrough featured almost no conflict on home shores, while Paris gives us a whole tableau that begins with a beheaded queen and ends with blood red streamers shot out of a building that once imprisoned that queen. In Britain, liberty is an inheritance, from the soil almost, protected by the Magna Carta. But this ceremony is saying that, in France, liberty is fought for.

• My classical music knowledge is more weighted toward France than I’d realized. 

• No piece of music has stuck in my head less than the Olympic anthem.

• Axelle Saint-Cirel, a Guadeloupean mezzo-soprano, sung an initially sombre arrangement of Le Marseillaise. (Guadeloupe is an overseas department of France.) This was an absolute triumph. She stood atop the Grand Palais, dressed as Marianne, the revolutionary embodiment of France. 

And yet: I am haunted by how ghastly it would have been to watch such an intentional display of a multicultural, vibrant France in the world we feared we’d enter less than three weeks ago, when the far right looked like it was going to win a majority. But for the coalition of left-leaning parties successfully blocking the National Rally in the second round of voting, I would have been watching all of this in horror. All of these Black performers and athletes and singers. The two Guadeloupean athletes (Teddy Riner and Marie-José Perec) who lit the cauldron. All of this could have been in service of something entirely more heinous. But let’s not get too sucked in. This cosmopolitan display shouldn’t distract us from the fact that hijabi athletes are not allowed to compete for France unless they remove their head covering. The Canadian sports journalist Shireen Ahmed is the person to follow on this travesty—and for her sports reporting more broadly.

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I GASPED—no, gasp-shrieked—when Rafa showed up to take the torch from Zizou.

What a cauldron.

And Celine—we are so glad to see you. You are incredible.

What did y’all think?