This {photograph} reveals the Eiffel Tower bearing the Olympics rings, lit-up forward of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic video games, in Paris on July 20, 2024. (Picture by MANAN VATSYAYANA / AFP)
Organisers of Friday’s opening ceremony for the Paris Olympics — the primary time will probably be held exterior a stadium — have supplied teasers for his or her spectacular plans however refused to provide specifics.
Here’s what we all know concerning the idea, the artists and music based mostly on public statements over the previous few months and press leaks:
READ MORE:
Lebron on Group USA: ‘A lot to enhance’ earlier than Olympics
Paris Olympics: Know your Cebuano Olympians
‘We’re prepared,’ say Paris Olympics organizers
What’s the idea?
As a substitute of utilizing the principle athletics stadium for the opening parade, as is customary, organisers have moved the occasion exterior and into the guts of the capital — consistent with their motto “Video games Extensive Open”.
Round 6,000-7,000 athletes are set to sail down a six-kilometre (four-mile) stretch of the river Seine from the Austerlitz bridge within the east to the Eiffel Tower, on 85 barges and boats.
As much as 500,000 persons are set to observe in particular person from specifically constructed stands, the place tickets have bought for as much as 2,700 euros ($2,900), on the river banks totally free and from the overlooking balconies and flats.
“Organising a ceremony on the Seine isn’t simpler than doing it in a stadium… nevertheless it has extra punch,” chief organiser Tony Estanguet instructed AFP earlier this month.
Due to the scale and complexity of the parade, it has by no means been rehearsed in full.
What concerning the leisure?
The present has been designed by prodigious theatre director Thomas Jolly, a 42-year-old recognized for hit rock-opera musical “Starmania”.
He introduced on board a inventive crew that features the author of French TV collection “Name My Agent”, Fanny Herrero, in addition to best-selling creator Leila Slimani and famend historian Patrick Boucheron.
The present has been break up into 12 totally different sections, with round 3,000 dancers, singers and entertainers positioned on each banks of the river, the bridges and close by monuments.
A tribute to Notre-Dame cathedral, within the strategy of being renovated after a devastating hearth in 2019, is assured, presumably with dancers on its scaffolding.
Beginning at 07:30pm (1730 GMT), two thirds of the ceremony will happen in daylight, then nightfall — Jolly is hoping for certainly one of Paris’s beautiful summer season sunsets — and can finish with a light-weight present.
The music will likely be a mixture of classical, conventional ‘chanson francaise’, in addition to rap and electro.
Franco-Malian R&B star Aya Nakamura is extensively tipped to carry out regardless of criticism from far-right politicians, together with Marine Le Pen who instructed an look by her would “humiliate” France.
French electro superstars Daft Punk mentioned they’d turned down an invite to play, whereas globe-trotting French DJ David Guetta has been neglected — a lot to his irritation.
What’s the message?
Requested to sum up his message final week, Jolly mentioned it was “love.”
Regardless of the chance of irking conservatives, he mentioned his work could be a celebration of cultural, linguistic, non secular and sexual range in France and all over the world.
“I feel the individuals who wish to dwell collectively on this range, this otherness, are rather more quite a few, however we make much less noise,” he instructed AFP.
It’s honest to imagine will probably be nothing just like the extensively panned retro-styled opening ceremony of final yr’s rugby World Cup, which featured a succession of French cliches from baguettes to berets and the Eiffel Tower.
Jolly’s crew can also be cautious of over-emphasising France’s historic contribution to the event of democracy and the idea of common human rights because of its Enlightenment philosophers and 1789 Revolution.
“We wished to keep away from our pure tendency to lecture folks,” Herrero instructed Le Monde newspaper lately.
And don’t count on a three-hour tribute to French greatness to rival the nationalistic pageantry seen on the Beijing Video games in 2008.
“The opening ceremony in Beijing in 2008 was precisely what we didn’t wish to do,” Boucheron instructed Le Monde.
What would be the huge moments?
With a lot nonetheless below wraps, it’s arduous to foretell.
A efficiency by Aya Nakamura, after a lot controversy about her function, could be a significant second so quickly after parliamentary elections that noticed the anti-immigration far-right achieve a historic 143 seats within the nationwide parliament.
Jolly has strongly hinted {that a} submersible or submarine may emerge from the waters of the Seine sooner or later.
“You might have the sky, you could have bridges, you could have water, you could have banks, you could have a lot house to make poetry,” Jolly instructed reporters final week. “So why not below the river additionally?”
The most important second of all would possibly merely be the tip if everybody will get house safely.
The ceremony has given French police chilly sweats ever because it was unveiled in 2021 due to the issue of securing so many individuals over such an enormous city space.
Round 45,000 members of the safety forces will likely be on responsibility.
Learn Subsequent
