It was a dreamlike, science fiction-inspired light-show spectacular that closed with Tom Cruise flying through the air from the stadium roof and whisking the Olympic flag off to Los Angeles.
Paris closed its record-breakingly successful Olympic Games on Sunday night with a stunt-filled final ceremony that began with a mysterious, golden intergalactic traveller wandering through a gloomy, barren futuristic landscape, tasked with resurrecting the Olympic spirit.
Ghostly dancers and acrobats – some of whom were fire-service gymnasts – descended from the Stade de France stadium roof and leaped on to giant Olympic rings while the Swiss musician Alain Roche performed Hymn to Apollo floating in the air playing a vertically suspended piano. The French singer Yseult gave a breathtaking performance of My Way, a nod to French-US relations as a French song that was rearranged in English for Frank Sinatra.
Paris said goodbye to its Olympics with a message about the importance of protecting the spirit of the games in an uncertain world riven by conflict.
The dramatic, pyrotechnic show was a fitting riposte to the epic, Technicolor riverside opening ceremony that broke with tradition by taking place along the Seine two weeks earlier. From that moment, the Paris Games had seen record ticket sales and TV viewing figures, and even a historic number of marriage proposals among athletes.
“Humanity is beautiful when it comes together,” said the theatre and opera director Thomas Jolly of his stadium show about celebrating “respect and tolerance” in a fragile world. He called the Games and the closing performance “a unique opportunity to share, reconcile and repair”.
The ceremony began before dusk beneath Paris’s groundbreaking Olympic cauldron suspended from a balloon, a dramatic ring of fire made up of electricity and LED spotlights to give the appearance of being ablaze.
The balloon-cauldron has become the city’s newest star attraction as thousands have gathered near the Louvre to watch it rise into the sky each night at sundown, and politicians are arguing that it should be kept in Paris permanently as a new landmark.
Beneath it, the award-winning young singer Zaho de Sagazan, whose voice and lyrics have transformed chanson française over the past two years, sang the classic 1950s ode to Paris Sous le Ciel de Paris, made famous by Édith Piaf. Suddenly, France’s star swimmer and gold-medal winner Léon Marchand, hailed in France as Le Roi Léon, appeared to whisk away the flame and the cauldron went out.
At that moment, more than 70,000 spectators in France’s biggest stadium began roaring and cheering as the action began. The Stade de France, which only days before had seen the high drama of the athletics relays and successes such as Armand Duplantis, the Swedish pole vaulter who broke his own world record, had now been transformed into a futuristic, glittering, undulating stage set.
Thousands of volunteers and athletes filled the stadium in a flag-waving moment of togetherness, not seen on this scale in these Games until now because the athletes had appeared in the opening ceremony in separate boats along the Seine.
Dancing, athletes, volunteers and spectators joined for one last time in belting out the dance anthem Freed from Desire, which had become an unofficial anthem at venues, followed by We are the Champions.
Paris had wanted its Games to be a giant open-air party, and the athletes’ final stadium appearance, dancing on the pitch, was no exception.
The ghostly gold traveller figure who landed from the sky was played by the French breakdancer Arthur Cadre, surrounded by hundreds of dancers and acrobats, as athletes stood around the stage looking on.
Flanked by athletes who had rushed on to the stage, the French electro-pop band Phoenix kicked off a music set that included the Belgian singer Angèle and the Cambodian rapper VannDa.
The Mission: Impossible star Cruise, abseiling in and then making off with the flag on a motorbike, set a Hollywood tone for the transfer to Los Angeles, the next host of the games in 2028.
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Appearing on the Paris stage with the US gold-medallist gymnast Simone Biles, the Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, was the first black female mayor to receive the Olympic flag. She had acknowledged before the closing ceremony that the French capital had set a high bar, but said her city was a worthy successor.
“It will be a challenge, but it will be a challenge we can step up to,” Bass had told reporters this week. “I think our Games will really show the diversity and the international character of our city.”
Every detail of the more than two weeks of Olympic events in Paris had been conceived as a visual extravaganza. Even the athletics track had been painted an unprecedented purple for athletic events – a break with tradition aimed at dazzling spectators and TV audiences. Venues such as the beach volleyball under the Eiffel Tower and equestrian events at the Chateau of Versailles were chosen for their picturesque backdrops.
Paris had sought to reinvent the Games, aiming to breathe new life into the world’s biggest sporting event to attract a younger audience and inspire more cities to apply to host the games. With the motto Games Wide Open, Paris brought sport out of the stadium and into the city centre. It was aimed at drawing a line under the last Games in Tokyo, which were held largely without spectators during the Covid pandemic.
In a celebration of women in sport, the women’s marathon winners were awarded their medals at the closing ceremony – the Netherlands’s Sifan Hassan took gold – as thousands of athletes cheered. It was unprecedented for the women’s, rather than the men’s marathons, to close the Olympics. The marathon course had deliberately retraced the route of a French revolutionary march in 1789 led by women from Paris to Versailles to take grievances to the king.
The Stade de France closing ceremony was also a feat of logistics – rehearsals had taken place between 1am and 5am between athletics sessions at the stadium.
Some in the ceremony’s creative team, including the director Jolly, were under special protection because of online death threats after the opening ceremony. That opening extravaganza, which featured Celine Dion singing Piaf from the Eiffel Tower, was overwhelmingly loved in France; one poll showed 86% of French people deemed it a success.
But its displays of LGBTQ+ pride and French humour were too much for some. Donald Trump and French bishops were among those who took offence at one of the ceremony’s tableaux, titled Festivity, featured a cast of drag queens and, playing Dionysus, a semi-naked singer sitting in a bowl of fruit. Some Christian and conservative critics interpreted the scene as a parody of the Last Supper. The committee later apologised for any offence caused by parts of the ceremony.
At the closing ceremony, some of the loudest cheers came when Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, spoke of the importance of sport bringing peace in times of conflict.