France has set its sights on making history on Friday with its audacious Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony unfolding on the River Seine in the heart of the French capital.
Kicking off at 7:30 p.m. local time, it will be the first ever Olympic inauguration to take place on a river and outside of a sports stadium for its entirety.
Over the course of three hours and 45 minutes (if the planned timing is respected), close to 7,000 of the 10,500 athletes competing in the games, representing 206 national delegations, will travel in 94 boats along a six-kilometer (3.7 mile) stretch of the river between the Pont d’Austerlitz and Pont d’Iena bridges.
The water parade will pass beside or under a host of Paris landmarks including the Notre Dame Cathedral, currently under re-construction following the devastating 2019 fire; the Pont Neuf, the Louvre and Place de la Concorde to arrive at the foot of the Eiffel Tower.
As the boats move up the river, their progress will be interspersed with 12 tableaus capturing the spirit of France, performed live on the river, its bridges and the buildings along its banks as well as in the sky above.
Drones are also expected to be deployed while the organizers have been testing out powerful laser lights on the Eiffel Tower in the early hours of the morning in recent days that illuminate buildings and neighborhoods across Paris.
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Expectations and fears are running high in France over the ceremony, which has generated wall-to-wall media coverage since the weekend on the ceremony’s format and potential line-up, with one newspaper declaring the event “the show of the century”.
Aside from French singing star Aya Nakamura, the organizers have been trying to keep the big name acts under wraps, but it was confirmed overnight that Celine Dion and Lady Gaga will perform an Edith Piaf classic together. There is deliberation over whether it will be La Vie En Rose or Hymne à l’Amour, or both.
For Dion, it will mark her first live performance since 2020, following her diagnosis with stiff person syndrome.
In the meantime, Lady Gaga’s participation chimes nicely with her upcoming appearance in Warner Bros.’ Joker 2, with parent company Warner Bros Discovery holding international rights to the games.
View of stands on the Seine
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Around 326,000 spectators will watch the show from tiered seating on the banks and bridges of the river, with 80 massive screens along the route also showing key moments at they unfold.
They will be joined by around 100 heads of state or government including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, newly installed UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German chancellor Olaf Scholz, Italian President Sergio Mattarella and more controversial figures such as the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, who has placed sport at the heart of his vision to break his country’s reliance on oil, and Argentinian President Javier Milei.
Absentees include Russian President Vladimir Putin, with Russia banned from this edition due to its war on Ukraine, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Chinese President Xi Jinping, who will be represented by his vice prime minister.
U.S. President Joe Biden will be represented by Jill Biden, in a configuration that was in place prior to his decision to withdraw from the presidential race.
At least another one billion people are expected to watch the ceremony worldwide. Filming of the ceremony and the games is handled exclusively by the International Olympic Committee’s own Madrid-based Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) audiovisual unit, which is employing 8,300 people across the different venues for the task.
IOC’s strict copyright rules around images of Olympic events means that media organizations capturing images of the ceremony – deliberately or unwittingly – from afar will face a lawsuit.
In the U.S., NBCUniversal’s live coverage will air Friday on NBC and flagship streaming service Peacock.
Under the Olympic Charter, alongside the artistic program, the ceremony must include a number of key elements such as the entrance of the head of state and International Olympic Committee (IOC) president; the playing of the host country’s national anthem; the revealing of the Olympic rings; a rendition of John Lennon’s iconic song ‘Imagine’ and the lighting of the Olympic cauldron.
Thomas Jolly
Gettyu Images
Artistic director Thomas Jolly is promising to wrap all these requirements into a new multilayered show, taking inspiration from Danny Boyle’s approach for the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012 which mixed UK pop culture, pomp, history and humor.
Le Parisien newspaper reported that French singer-songwriter Juliette Armanet will perform ‘Imagine’ somewhere on the Seine during the river parade, while other media have reported that France’s national anthem, La Marseillaise, will be sung on the roof of the Grand Palais.
Differently from London, Jolly reportedly had a budget of around $150M, with some media outlets suggesting that the ceremony’s cost has exceeded this, against Boyle’s $35M in 2012.
Theatre director Jolly was scouted for the artistic director role in May 2022, after a 2021 interview with French sports newspaper L’Equipe caught the attention of Thierry Reboul, creative director for the 2024 games.
In the interview, Jolly replied to a hypothetical question on how he would stage the 2024 opening ceremony. Jolly let his imagination run riot, not expecting his over-the-top plans to ever come to fruition, but his ideas roused Reboul’s interest.
Jolly’s theatre career has been marked by its diversity, with credits ranging from an 18-hour version of Shakespeare’s Henry VI to recent seasons of the 1970s rock-opera Starmania.
Initial sources of inspiration were Sequana, the goddess of the River Seine, and King Iphitos, who per legend, created the Olympic games in the ninth century BC in a bid to bring peace to then warring Ancient Greece.
Jolly brought on a team of four writers comprising Call My Agent! Showrunner Fanny Herrero, writer Leila Slimani, best known internationally for The Perfect Nanny; celebrated historian Patrick Boucheron and director Damien Gabriac to write the show.
The group travelled up and down the six-kilometer stretch of the Seine earmarked for the ceremony, taking inspiration from its landmarks, from bridges, monuments and the buildings on its banks.
Collaborating over the course of nine months from September to early summer, 2023, they developed and perfected the idea of 12 tableaus capturing the spirit of France, its values as well as its contributions to culture and history, weaving in aspects of the river journey.
The exact themes have not been divulged but hazarding a guess, revolution, political freedom, cinema and French cuisine could be expected to make an appearance.
The job of translating their vision into a performance was handed to composer and music producer and arranger Victor Le Masne, who collaborated with Jolly on Starmania, choreographer Maud Le Pladec, TV presenter and stylist Daphné Burki, for the costumes and set designers Emmanuelle Favre and Bruno de Lavenère.
Choreographer Maud le Pladec leads a dance rehearsal
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The resulting show will feature more than 3,000 dancers and actors, with some of the tableaus gathering more than 400 people “on stage” at one time.
In the backdrop, a massive security operation has been underway for months, which has intensified in with the introduction of a three-tier security system last week.
A grey zone along the river and other key Olympic sites is now only accessible to local residents and workers, or people who have a hotel or restaurant reservation in the area.
Acting French Interior Minister Gérald Darminin said earlier this week that no direct threat to the games had been identified but with memories of the November 2015 terror attacks still strong and amid global tensions around the war In Ukraine and the Israel/Gaza conflict, the country remains on high alert.
Each of the 94 boats in the parade will be accompanied by police officers from France’s elite GIGN counterterrorism unit, with another 45,000 police officers, 20,000 private security agents 18,000 military personnel on patrol around the city.
Ticketholders for the ceremony have been warned to arrive early with last entry to the site at 6:30 p.m., one hour before the show’s kick-off.
Airspace for a 150-kilometer (93 mile) radius around the capital will be closed from 6:30 p.m. to midnight.
Speaking to France Info on Thursday morning, the French Air Forces General Laurent Rataud said his service had thought through every type of scenario from rogue drones to a 9/11-type, airline-hijacking scenario.
Explaining the 150-kilometer non-flight zone, he said: “That’s about the distance a commercial airliner travels in 10 minutes. Ten minutes is the time it takes for us, the Air Force, to be able to intervene, to come into contact with an aircraft which enters this prohibited zone and to be able to deploy all the necessary actions.”