2024 Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony: Four winners and six losers

Ready or not, the 2024 Paris Olympic Games have begun.

As with any quadrennial, there will be stories of glorious triumph, heartbreaking defeat, feel-good underdogs, and maybe even a villain or two. But headed into Paris this year, one of the main storylines was whether or not the city could properly host the Games — and whether Parisians even wanted this in the first place.

This will be the first “normal” Olympics since the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, after the global pandemic completely altered Tokyo 2020 (so much so that those Games were actually held in 2021) and the attendance-limited 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

There were big questions about what the 2024 Games would look like. With some of the events taking place in major hubs of the city — the beach volleyball stadium overlooks the Eiffel Tower — will Paris be able to handle the crush of visitors coming to see the Games? Are the security restrictions going to make being in the city a hassle? Who’s going to perform at the opening ceremonies? What is everyone going to wear? Is the Seine River clean enough to swim in? Why is Parisian Mayor Anne Hidalgo so eager to swim in it?

Today, we started to get a few answers.

For these first truly post-pandemic Games, Thomas Jolly, the artistic director of the Opening Ceremony, pursued a hugely ambitious performance.

Not only did he intermingle the parade of athletes with the show — typically two separate portions — but he also took both portions out of a stadium into the city itself, along a 6-kilometer route along the Seine. Instead of marching on a stadium floor, the athletes floated down the river on a variety of boats as the camera occasionally cut away to musical and dance performances, pretaped videos highlighting Parisian or French cultural touchstones, or the mysterious masked figure hurtling through the city like a cat burglar and carrying Olympic torch over Parisian roofs and through the city’s spooky, watery underground. Over 3,000 musical artists, dancers, actors, and circus performers participated.

At times, it was inspiring; at others, the attempted grandeur was somewhat lost. That wasn’t all that was going on today, too.

From the Opening Ceremony of the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad, here are four winners and six losers.

Instead of having the festivities in a stadium, as is standard, French officials decided to have their commencement ceremony throughout the city, snaking down the Seine — and in case you hadn’t already heard about that choice, the video intro starring French football legend Zinedine Zidane stated as much. Weaving performances within the city allowed for some impressive visuals that highlight Paris’s history and stunning architecture. You could see why this city is one of the greatest in the world.

But the tradeoff was that it wasn’t always TV-friendly. Because of the way the stage was set up and where cameras were placed, Lady Gaga’s feather-filled cabaret on the Seine was cut off at the ankles, hobbling the full impact of the choreography. And, in a sequence entitled “Liberty,” with decapitated Marie Antoinettes singing alongside flamethrowers, the wide shots failed to convey the spectacle. As country delegations floated down the Seine, it was difficult to pick out individual athletes — both for viewers and announcers potentially interested in sharing information about their talents

When you hold an event in a stadium, you can anticipate sight lines and figure out how to stage and block a show. Stadiums are built for performance and visuals! And Paris’s opening ceremony is the clearest example of how hard it is to design a show without those tools.

—Alex Abad-Santos, senior correspondent

That said, Lady Gaga still had a fantastic performance.

One of the opening ceremony’s worst-kept surprises was Lady Gaga. Spotting a grand piano positioned near the river in the days beforehand, Little Monsters (the self-created name for Gaga’s dedicated fans) deduced that the superstar would be performing. And that she did, conjuring up a French cabaret number on the banks of the Seine. Gaga performed Renée Jeanmaire’s “Mon Truc en Plumes” (“My Thing With Feathers”) in full plumage, showing that she’s still the most theater-inclined pop star in the business. Of course, Gaga will star in Joker: Folie à Deux later this year, a musical-ish sequel to the infamous Batman villain’s origin story. And this performance will, no doubt, build hype for Gaga’s turn in that movie.

In her first performance since she was diagnosed with stiff-person syndrome in 2022, Celine Dion ascended the Eiffel Tower and performed Edith Piaf’s “Hymne a L’Amour.” To be honest, even though the legendary vocalist sounded fantastic, it wouldn’t have mattered how well Dion performed — simply appearing in public after the physical and emotional toll she’s endured over the last few years would be considered an accomplishment. That Dion delivered a beautiful triumph on one of the world’s biggest stages was simply Celine.

As my colleague Josh Keating wrote earlier this week, the Paris Olympics face an unprecedented array of security threats, from renewed worries about ISIS terrorism to the very real danger of Russian sabotage. In part to keep the athletes and the spectators safe, French officials have flooded Paris with police, and are even employing a controversial artificial intelligence system that can flag potential security concerns. It’s all meant to fulfill France’s promise that Paris during the Olympics will be “the safest place in the world.”

So far, not so great. Early Friday morning France was hit by what appeared to be coordinated arson attacks targeting the country’s high-speed rail lines. The result was numerous canceled trains, disrupting travel plans of up to a million people, including spectators, Parisians fleeing the city, and potentially even some athletes. Fortunately, the attacks, which no one has yet claimed responsibility for, caused no deaths or injuries, and the Opening Ceremonies themselves started on schedule. But it’s still an ill omen when something goes wrong before the Olympic flame is even lit.

—Bryan Walsh, editorial director

With 423 total medals in the country’s Summer Olympic history — not to mention the 1,010 won when it was part of the Soviet Union — Russia has a solid claim as one of the most successful nations in Olympic history. But only 15 athletes from Russia will be among the more than 10,000 Olympians in Paris. They won’t be able to compete under the Russian flag, and should any of them win a gold medal, they won’t hear the Russian national anthem at the medal podium.

That’s because Russia has been banned from participating as a national team because of its invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — a ban that came on the heels of another ban earlier because of a widespread doping scandal. (The same goes for Russia’s close ally Belarus.)

Partially as a result, Russia’s reaction to being excluded from the Paris Games amounts to “well, we wouldn’t want to play in your silly Olympics anyway.” The Games won’t be shown on Russian TV, and the media largely seems to be ignoring the Olympics.

It’s fair to feel bad for the hundreds of Russian athletes who were more than good enough to make the Games (and potentially win medals), though at the very least Moscow will be compensating them. But hopefully sour grapes will be the extent of Russia’s reactions. There are legitimate fears that Moscow could decide to sabotage the Olympics in some way, either through cyberwarfare or even something in the real world.

Headed into the Olympics, one of the biggest questions was whether or not the Seine, Paris’s famous and famously coffee-tinted river, would be safe to swim in. The city has spent $1.5 billion to clean it and make it safe enough to host Olympic open-water swimming events. Yet, like the litany of tragic man versus nature stories, all that money and manpower could be a wasted testament to hubris.

Earlier this spring, French President Emmanuel Macron and Paris Mayor Hidalgo promised to swim in the Seine themselves, a gambit to demonstrate how safe it was. Ultimately, only Hidalgo followed through.

And as mentioned in the NBC broadcast, it’s been raining and storming in Paris and that means sewage could flow into the Seine making it unsafe to swim in. Announcers said it was touch and go, and officials will be monitoring bacteria levels in the river before anyone gets in.

South Sudan is the world’s youngest nation, only gaining independence in 2011. It only sent its first team to the Olympics in the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro, which included just three athletes. It has yet to win any medals.

But this year South Sudan has sent 14 Olympians to Paris, all but two of whom are on the men’s basketball team. That team, which is known as the Bright Stars, has been writing a Cinderella story of its own. With former NBA star Luol Deng as its driving force, South Sudan made the Olympics as international basketball’s top team in Africa. And only a last-minute layup from Team USA’s LeBron James kept the South Sudanese from pulling off an all-time basketball upset during a warmup game last week.

If you’re not rooting for these guys in Paris, you’re either actually on one of the 11 other basketball teams competing for gold, or you have no heart. Shine on, you crazy Bright Stars.

Since 2008, Ralph Lauren has designed the opening ceremony looks for Team USA and 2024 is no different. This year, Team USA are once again sporting blazers and pairing them with blue jeans. Americana! Perhaps it’s because this year’s outfits make the athletes resemble kids at a fancy country club or that the uniforms look vaguely like this at every Olympics, but the design just didn’t have the wow factor this year — especially when you compare the fits to the stunners coming from Haiti, Mongolia, and Taiwan.

Let me be clear — I’m a big fan of LeBron James, who is the US team male flag bearer at the Opening Ceremonies. And the same goes for tennis star Coco Gauff, currently the world’s No. 2 women’s player and the US team female flag bearer. And I can understand Team USA’s desire to put two of its biggest stars front and center in the march down the Seine.

But here’s the thing about big-time pro sports stars in the Olympics. Their Olympics are not these Olympics. James likely cares about getting one more NBA championship ring, while Gauff is probably already thinking about her chances at the US Open in New York. The Olympics, for highly paid pro stars, are not the be-all and end-all of their athletic careers.

So why not put two athletes front and center at the Opening Ceremonies for whom the Paris Games really will be the pinnacle of their sporting life? How about 42-year-old Diana Taurasi, who is making her unprecedented sixth Olympic appearance for the (honestly superior to the men’s) women’s basketball team?? And for the men, how Noah Lyles, who is aiming to sweep the individual and relay short-distance sprinting events? I’m sure LeBron and Coco would have gotten over it.

Hundreds of thousands of athletes around the world competed desperately to be one of the 10,500 who made it to Paris. And from the sound of it, hundreds of thousands of Parisians are competing just as hard to ensure they won’t be in Paris.

Attitudes among Parisians toward the Paris Olympics have been profoundly mixed. One survey from last year found that nearly half the city was considering leaving during the Games. To some degree, not being in Paris during late July and August is a precondition of being a Parisian — as any tourist who has come to the City of Light in the summer can attest, actual Parisians can be hard to find. But the Olympics have turbocharged the migration, with the number of Paris apartments listed on Airbnb increasing by 85 percent over the past year. Sure, they might miss a sporting moment of transcendence, but I’d probably rather be sunning myself on the Côte d’Azur too.