NO NO, LE déluge is meant to come après!
In his pre-ceremony address to the media, Thomas Jolly, the artistic director of Paris’ opening ceremony, explained the kick-off time.
“We have deliberately chosen the most beautiful of lighting: by starting the ceremony at 7.30pm, we are counting on the sun and its flashes of gold to illuminate the stone and make the water sparkle.”
Malheureusement.
The rain fell in staccato showers throughout the day and then poured with ignorant consistency once the first Olympic opening ceremony to be held outside of a stadium got underway.
For a long time, this ceremony fit snugly with much of French high art as something better envisioned than experienced.
The plan was mildly daft. Eighty-five boats would take 6,800 athletes more than 6km from the Pont d’Austerlitz and west to the Trocadéro at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, and the libération of the ceremony meant a lockdown of the surrounding area and the city’s biggest security operation since the second world war. It was eerie to snap a picture of the Arc de Triomphe free of traffic, only to then spot the snipers on its roof.
While 200,000 people could line the Seine for free and feel part of the ceremony, it nonetheless made the athletes feel oddly distant and apart. They were also separated from one another, aside from those with whom they shared a boat. (This was done on alphabetical order, with Ireland in with Iraq, curiously, rather than Israel.) Everything initially felt so sprawled and disjointed that the best way of seeing it all was with a Canadian soccer drone.
The ambition was to cast Paris as the star of the show, but the murk of the water, the scowl of the sky and the bare facade of the background bridges lent everything a curiously grey, listless feeling.
The experience for those of us fortunate to be present was sadly indivisible from the misery of the rain. Media, administrators, celebrities and dignitaries were arranged in grandstands at the finish line beneath the Eiffel Tower. This meant we were effectively watching the whole show on television, but in the lashing rain. I was reminded of Con Houlihan’s line of how he missed Italia ’90 because he was in Italy, but that was a pithy ode to the astonishing and unrepeatable joy released at home. My issue was I couldn’t keep my glasses clean.
Only the VVIPs had a roof on their stand but still the rain blew in on top of them, which at least gave the whole occasion an oddly democratic feel. Having been at the Qatar World Cup, at which Fifa president Gianni Infantino was chauffeured about to ensure he could attend pretty much every game, I felt a strange sense of égalité at seeing him as saturated as the rest of us, photographed sodden in a poncho, looking like a deployed prophylactic.
But the entire timbre of the occasion shifted when darkness spread and the night foreclosed on that sense of distance. Most cities look better by night, of course, and no city looks better than Paris.
The crescendo was irresistible, kicking off with a section the organisers presumably titled Who Is Taking The Metallic Robot Horse to France. The trot down to the Trocadero was majestic, at which point we had to suffer through a few speeches and the recital of the Olympic Truce before Zinedine Zidane reappeared with the Olympic torch. Zidane was born in Marseille but he has Paris’ effortless and eternal suavity.
Zizou then handed the torch to adopted Parisien Rafa Nadal, though if the organisers truly believed in the Olympic Truce, he would have passed it to Marco Materazzi.
The finale was audacious, a long relay culminating in the lighting of a cauldron tethered to a hot air balloon, which then took flight and now hovers over Paris like a second sun. As the cauldron hung as high as viewers’ jaws hung low, Celine Dion appeared atop the Eiffel Tower in her first public appearance for two years, belting out Édith Piaf.
Nobody marries confidence with audacity like the French. Nobody is so committed to doing something brilliant solely for brilliance sake.
IOC president Thomas Bach drawled of sport’s powers to unite, of how the Olympics has no “Global South”, and no “Global North.” This is, of course, nonsense, because the Games mirror the political fractures of our time. That’s why Russia aren’t competing in Paris, and it’s why the Palestinian team displayed peace symbols during their 40 seconds of air time on the Seine.
We are so often told that the West and Europe are in decline, and of how its great capitals are slowly bleeding eminence.
But to see their loose and disjointed ceremony slowly cohere as night fell, and to see the Louvre, Eiffel Tower and the whole city lit up and freshly illuminated by the easily suspended cauldron was to swoon once more for Paris and tell yourself that, yes, what is great may always remain great.
