American sprinter Noah Lyles, drenched from standing on a barge on the Seine during the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony, was already keen to rewatch the event later from a cozy, dry spot.
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| Lady Gaga performs at the Sully bridge area before the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. LARS BARON/GETTY IMAGES |
“I just love seeing moments made,” said Lyles, an incredibly charismatic figure on the brink of global fame.
Lyles will definitely get a thrill from the Paris opening when he eventually watches it, especially if he uses a service with a fast-forward button.
Your typical Olympics Opening Ceremony is often a desperate and extravagant attempt to create one or two memorable moments that will be discussed for weeks, if not years. Directed by the artistic genius Thomas Jolly, the Paris Opening Ceremony delivered potentially dozens of stunning, emotional, and visually spectacular moments. To say these moments came "one after another" would not accurately capture the deliberate pacing of this four-hour masterpiece.
Traditionally, the Opening Ceremony is held in the main Olympic venue, which hosts multiple competitions and the ceremonial Olympic cauldron. This allows tens of thousands of people to experience the event uniformly, along with viewers at home. The presentations typically highlight the host country's culture and national identity, but a stadium remains just that—a stadium.
Jolly and the French organizers took a different approach: "Nah. Screw that. We’ll always have Paris."
The Parade of Nations, usually an endless march around a track, transformed into a flotilla of yachts, barges, and powerboats traveling down four miles of the Seine. The boats passed iconic landmarks like the Mint, known for producing Olympic medals, and Notre-Dame Cathedral, which rang its bells for the first time since the 2019 fire. Bridges turned into red carpet fashion shows, stationary floats became musical stages or the gardens of Versailles, complete with bike stunts.
The Eiffel Tower served as a temporary stadium where the torch was collected and taken to another boat, which journeyed back down the Seine. The torchbearers continued through the Louvre courtyard and across the Tuileries Garden, culminating with a hot air balloon serving as the unique cauldron.
At some point, Mike Tirico, who was part of the NBC announcing crew with Kelly Clarkson and Peyton Manning, remarked on how many iconic Parisian landmarks hadn’t been included in the ceremony. He said, "…like, how many hours did anybody have available?" It's difficult to think of many other cities that would attempt such a geography-spanning Opening Ceremony—Rome and Athens might manage a similar parade of landmarks, but it wouldn't be wise.
This Opening Ceremony was designed for television. Those watching along the Seine likely had incredible experiences—apart from the rain—but if you faced the challenges to be there in person, you didn't see everything. You might have missed almost all of the individual performances along the way, at least not with your own eyes.
I can’t comment on what screens were set up or how many people streamed the event on their phones, but only a small group of attendees had the right view for live experiences like Lady Gaga's rendition of “Mon Truc En Plume.”
Others saw the bridge fashion show, and some witnessed Celine Dion’s climactic Edith Piaf cover. Overall, my view from my couch, and yours from yours, was better than what any single person in Paris experienced.
[It’s worth noting that this TV-centric approach prioritized the global audience, sidelining actual Parisians. This relates to reports of local authorities poorly treating residents, especially the unhoused, in recent weeks.
You needed either extreme patience or considerable wealth to get a front-row seat, and if you had the wealth of Croesus, you might not have enjoyed the whimsically gory segment on the executions of French nobility.]
The live performances, imbued with death-defying stakes and evocative visual textures that only intensified as darkness enveloped the City of Lights, were both outrageous and excellent, despite the slippery stages and limited rehearsal time.
Gaga, playful, sassy, and perfect as the opener for the ceremony, was thoroughly entertaining. However, if we're being honest, it felt a bit small-scale. A dozen people with minimal choreography on a bend in the Seine—I’m not sure I would have wanted to witness it live.
I doubt you could have fully appreciated my favorite performance of the evening, French mezzo-soprano Axelle Saint-Cirel belting "La Marseillaise" from a rooftop, holding a flag, in the pouring rain, or seen Mali-born French superstar Aya Nakamura in her dazzling golden fringe from any vantage point.
Not all performances were flawless. A line of can-can dancers precariously perched on the edge of the Seine seemed to have abandoned their choreography, possibly due to the dangers of high-kicking on wet concrete, or perhaps they were always meant to be a bit of a joke. As my friend Linda Holmes quipped on Bluesky: “This can-can has a bit of can’t-can’t mixed in, and I say that as a person who definitely couldn’t-couldn’t.”
What stood out was the ceremony's relentless delivery of breathtaking ideas. The image of the metallic horse, carrying a knight with the Olympic flag, soaring down the Seine on some wild underwater apparatus—or perhaps on the back of Lilith, the shark from Under Paris—will stay with me forever. The wildly inclusive fashion show on the bridge, featuring models of all ages, sizes, races, and places on the gender spectrum, was an absolute delight.
Anytime there was a lull, and sometimes even when there wasn’t, smaller countries in the Parade of Nations lost exposure to filmed segments.
Ultimately, the Masked Torch Bearer, who received the ceremonial torch from a group of children after it was passed by soccer legend Zinedine Zidane, didn’t serve much purpose. However, watching them run through the Louvre, do parkour across slippery rooftops, and zip-line from building to building was thrilling in the moment.
A filmed tribute to French storytelling and cinema, featuring The Little Prince, an homage to Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune, and a nod to the original 1968 version of Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes was fantastic. Ending the tribute with several minutes of Minions was not.
The well-choreographed Stomp-style dance outside the Mint was also impressive. Starting it with a Louis Vuitton commercial was not.
Considering the technical and logistical challenges of the live components, I understand why filmed material, filler and otherwise, was necessary.
If I’m dipping into negativity about a ceremony I greatly admired, the biggest frustration was, as always, NBC’s coverage.
Reliably jingoistic, the NBC crew did a fantastic job showcasing many aspects of the American contingent, including excellent interviews with Lyles and drenched flag bearers LeBron James and Coco Gauff—“Après LeBron, le déluge”—and a very funny interview with Joel Embiid, who was happy to speak from one of the American barge’s indoor spaces.
No other country received the same level of attention, and all others were treated as secondary. Tirico noted early on that the Paris presentation didn’t lend itself to the usual global trivia that accompanies the Parade of Nations. Fair enough, but instead of that trivia, which I always found helpful, Tirico, Manning, and Clarkson often provided nothing of value. Tirico was dull, Manning anxiously filled the silence, and Clarkson, after bringing her trademark excitement to the first hour, was nearly silent for the rest until Dion moved her (and many others) to tears.
It's one thing to skip trivia. Fine. I can look up that Eswatini is the new name for Swaziland.
It's one thing to steer clear of politics, aside from brief mentions of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It's another to fail to identify at least half the singers, rappers, and performers who played crucial roles in the event. These performers received, at best, a token verbal acknowledgment. Why not use a chyron in the lower corner to give curious viewers a chance to look up the details the announcers couldn't provide? And why not put some of that usual Parade of Nations trivia in chyrons?
In my opinion, there are two ways to broadcast: You can go without announcers (or use very few) like much of the rest of the world, letting audiences experience the Opening Ceremony in an unbiased, unfiltered way. Or, if you need announcers, make sure they have the information to provide more than just American cheerleading (at least get announcers capable of making a Jules et Jim reference during a segment about the French art of the threesome).
But enough criticism—kudos to Jolly and the Paris organizers. No matter how the rest of the Olympics go, the Opening Ceremony was a spectacular show of the highest (and longest) order.
And no one got eaten by the sharks in the Seine.
