The Paris Olympic Video games opened on Friday night time with a high-kitsch, riverside spectacle, as an armada of boats carried athletes alongside the Seine, dancers dangled from excessive poles, drag queens paraded on bridges and the Olympic rings lit up the Eiffel Tower – all beneath unrelenting, torrential rain.
France had promised its opening ceremony can be the most important open-air present on Earth. Greater than 300,000 folks watched the riverside and bridges – and tons of extra stood at home windows and balconies – as a present of dance, live-music and acrobatics unfolded alongside greater than 6km of river from the Pont d’Austerlitz to the Eiffel Tower.
The present had promised to light-heartedly deconstruct French stereotypes, and the US singer Woman Gaga was the primary star to set the tone for a tongue-in-cheek kitsch spectacle. She appeared from a large golden staircase on the sting of the Seine surrounded by pink pompoms and big pink feather followers, for a high-kicking cabaret efficiency of France’s well-known Nineteen Sixties music-hall quantity “Mon Truc en plumes” by Zizi Jeanmaire.
Later the pop singer Aya Nakamura, the most-listened to French-speaking artist on this planet, stepped on to the Pont des Arts in a daring musical juxtaposition that noticed her carry out with France’s Republican Guard, who have been in good formation on navy drums. Nakamura sang extracts of songs by the legendary French crooner Charles Aznavour, in addition to her personal hits, Pookie and Djadja, with the French military choir and navy brass band.
Nakamura’s presence was thought-about a triumph after a racist backlash in opposition to the prospect of her singing had prompted the Paris prosecutor to open an investigation into alleged racist abuse in opposition to her earlier this yr. Some on the French far-right – which was held again from taking energy by an enormous surge of tactical voting within the current snap parliament election – had complained earlier this yr that Nakamura, who grew up within the Paris suburbs, was not French sufficient to carry out.
Paris’s rain-soaked river social gathering was the primary time the opening ceremony of the world’s greatest sporting occasion had taken place exterior a stadium, with athletes parading not round an athletics-track however in a flotilla of boats.
However the out of doors ceremony, as soon as described by Emmanuel Macron as “a loopy concept that have to be made actual”, needed to overcome obstacles.
First, a collection of sabotage assaults on the high-speed TGV rail community brought about journey chaos throughout France hours earlier than the ceremony started. Then got here a climate nightmare: as a substitute of the gentle summer time night mild that administrators had hoped for, there was a deluge because the skies opened with such relentless, torrential rain that climate forecasters stated it was the equal of 15 days’ rainfall in six hours.
Rain totally soaked athletes and spectators, a lot of whom have been exterior with no cowl for your entire present, which lasted virtually 4 hours. Even some dignitaries briefly left their seats within the tribune at Trocadero after getting drenched.
But it surely was all about willpower within the face of adversity. Thomas Jolly, the younger French director who created the surreal and irreverent present, had stated he didn’t need simply “ephemeral glitz” however an exploration of what underpins “our shared humanity”.
He stated he selected the Seine for its “energy to heal” from tragedies like Paris’s 2015 terrorist assaults, in addition to the 2019 fireplace at Notre Dame. Certainly, a part of the present was a spectacular pre-filmed dance routine of staff performing high-risk dance strikes whereas hanging off the scaffolding round Notre Dame.
The night started with 6,800 Olympic athletes bussed from the Olympic Village to Pont d’Austerlitz within the east of the town, the place the French navy guarded them as they climbed on to boats.
Greece’s boat set out first, within the Olympic custom, adopted by the Olympic refugee workforce, then different nations sailed down the river on 85 boats. The Ukrainian delegation obtained an enormous ovation from the group on the riverside.
Not for the reason that time of Louis XV has a ceremony seen a formation of boats crusing the identical path down the Seine, and it was cheered on by folks hanging from home windows.
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The Technicolor homage to French cliches of ages previous included a lady in a gown coated in croissants main a vibrant crowd in direction of a gaggle of French can-can dancers in vibrant pink outfits. They delivered a standard skirt-shaking, leg-spinning can-can efficiency, earlier than ending within the splits on the sting of the Seine.
The Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, had referred to as the present “joyous, inventive and never very properly behaved”.
In a nod to the sheeting rain, tons of of dancers splashed in a synchronised dance routine by way of troughs of water in a dramatic present on the Île de la Cité, close to Notre Dame. Dancers dressed as resort bell-boys then carried out acrobatics on a bridge after transporting Louis Vuitton suitcases – the compulsory nod to sponsors. France’s greatest loss of life steel band, Gojira, carried out amid taking pictures 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 brand new association of the French nationwide anthem, La Marseillaise, draped within the tricolour flag on the glass roof the Grand Palais.
All this time a mysterious, faceless determine was darting throughout the rooftops of the town with the Olympic flame. At the very least one billion viewers have been watching on TV and social media, and the filmed segments have been simply as vital because the dwell efficiency, with France’s former soccer star Zinedine Zidane kicking off by carrying the Olympic flame by way of a movie set of kitsch Nineteen Sixties cafe terraces on to a Métro practice. He arrived to cheers on the Trocadero.
The present, which culminated on the Eiffel Tower, occurred amid an unprecedented safety operation within the metropolis, with 45,000 cops and 1000’s of troopers.
Tony Estanguet, the three-time Olympic canoe champion who’s the Paris Olympics’ chief organiser, instructed the athletes: “Welcome to your second in historical past – dwell it and like it.”
On the finish, Charles Coste, the oldest French Olympic champion at 100, took the flame from his wheelchair, then handed it on to French judo nice Teddy Riner and sprinter Marie-José Pérec. They lit a cauldron connected to a large balloon, earlier than Celine Dion sang Edith Piaf’s “Hymn to Love”, in her first public efficiency in years, drawing big cheers from the group.
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