The Paris Olympic Games opened on Friday night with a high-kitsch, riverside spectacle, as an armada of boats carried athletes along the Seine, dancers dangled from high poles, drag queens paraded on bridges and the Olympic rings lit up the Eiffel Tower – all under unrelenting, torrential rain.
France had promised its opening ceremony would be the biggest open-air show on Earth. More than 300,000 people watched from the riverside and bridges – and hundreds more stood at windows and balconies – as a show of dance, live music and acrobatics unfolded along more than 6km of river from the Pont d’Austerlitz to the Eiffel Tower.
The show had promised to light-heartedly deconstruct French stereotypes, and the US singer Lady Gaga was the first star to set the tone for a tongue-in-cheek kitsch spectacle. She appeared from a giant golden staircase on the edge of the Seine surrounded by pink pompoms and giant pink feather fans, for a high-kicking cabaret performance of France’s famous 1960s music-hall number Mon Truc en plumes by Zizi Jeanmaire.
Later the pop singer Aya Nakamura, the most-listened to French-speaking artist in the world, stepped on to the Pont des Arts in a bold musical juxtaposition that saw her perform with France’s Republican Guard, who were in perfect formation on military drums. Nakamura sang extracts of songs by the legendary French crooner Charles Aznavour, as well as her own hits, Pookie and Djadja, with the French army choir and military brass band.
Nakamura’s presence was considered a triumph after a racist backlash against the prospect of her singing had prompted the Paris prosecutor to open an investigation into alleged racist abuse against her earlier this year. Some on the French far right – which was held back from taking power by a massive surge of tactical voting in the recent snap parliament election – had complained earlier this year that Nakamura, who grew up in the Paris suburbs, was not French enough to perform.
Paris’s rain-soaked river party was the first time the opening ceremony of the world’s biggest sporting event had taken place outside a stadium, with athletes parading not around an athletics track but in a flotilla of boats.
But the outdoor ceremony, once described by Emmanuel Macron as “a crazy idea that must be made real”, had to overcome obstacles.
First, a series of sabotage attacks on the high-speed TGV rail network caused travel chaos across France hours before the ceremony began. Then came a weather nightmare: instead of the soft summer evening light that directors had hoped for, there was a deluge as the skies opened with such relentless rain that weather forecasters said it was the equivalent of 15 days’ rainfall in six hours.
Rain thoroughly soaked athletes and spectators, many of whom were outside with no cover for the entire show, which lasted almost four hours. Even some dignitaries temporarily left their seats in the tribune at Trocadero after getting drenched.
But it was all about determination in the face of adversity. Thomas Jolly, the young French director who created the surreal and irreverent show, had said he did not want just “ephemeral glitz” but an exploration of what underpins “our shared humanity”.
He said he chose the Seine for its “power to heal” from tragedies such as Paris’s 2015 terrorist attacks, as well as the 2019 fire at Notre Dame. Indeed, part of the show was a spectacular pre-filmed dance routine of workers performing high-risk moves while hanging off the scaffolding around Notre Dame.
The evening began with 6,800 athletes bussed from the Olympic Village to Pont d’Austerlitz in the east of the city, where the French military guarded them as they climbed on to boats.
Greece’s boat set out first, in the Olympic tradition, followed by the Olympic refugee team, then other nations sailed down the river on 85 boats. The Ukrainian delegation received a massive ovation from the crowd on the riverside.
Not since the time of Louis XV has a ceremony seen a formation of boats sailing the same direction down the Seine, and it was cheered on by people hanging from windows.
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The Technicolor homage to French cliches included a woman in a dress covered in croissants leading a colourful crowd towards a group of French can-can dancers in bright pink outfits. They delivered a traditional skirt-shaking, leg-spinning can-can performance, before ending in the splits on the edge of the Seine.
The Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, had called the show “joyous, creative and not very well behaved”.
In a nod to the sheeting rain, hundreds of dancers splashed in a synchronised dance routine through troughs of water in a dramatic show on the Île de la Cité, near Notre Dame. Dancers dressed as hotel bell-boys then performed acrobatics on a bridge after transporting Louis Vuitton suitcases – the obligatory nod to sponsors. France’s biggest death metal band, Gojira, performed amid shooting 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 new arrangement of the French national anthem, La Marseillaise, draped in the tricolour flag on the glass roof of the Grand Palais.
All this time a mysterious, faceless figure was darting across the rooftops of the city with the Olympic flame. At least one billion viewers were watching on TV and social media, and the filmed segments were just as important as the live performance, with France’s former football star Zinedine Zidane kicking off by carrying the Olympic flame through a film set of kitsch 1960s cafe terraces on to a Métro train. He arrived to cheers at the Trocadero.
The show, which culminated at the Eiffel Tower, took place amid an unprecedented security operation in the city, with 45,000 police officers and thousands of soldiers.
Tony Estanguet, the three-time Olympic canoe champion who is the Paris Olympics’ chief organiser, told the athletes: “Welcome to your moment in history – live it and love it.”
At the end, Charles Coste, the oldest French Olympic champion at 100, took the flame from his wheelchair, then passed it on to French judo great Teddy Riner and sprinter Marie-José Pérec. They lit a cauldron attached to a giant balloon, before Celine Dion sang Edith Piaf’s Hymn to Love, in her first public performance in years, drawing huge cheers from the crowd.