The supremely frustrating part of visiting any city is transit: the gruelling, hot, bureaucratic business of getting from park to landmark to cathedral. It’s the most boring and yet fortunately the most forgettable component of any holiday. But, in a baffling turn for an event that is at least partially a tourism advert, it seems the ambition of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony was to try to recreate that experience and serve it up as televisual longform. The overwhelming mood of the opening ceremony was tedium. And perhaps its one salvation was that, in its later stages, it featured enough madness to distract from the banality.
Ahead of yesterday evening’s proceedings, the much-touted USP was its en plein air quality. That is, instead of being based in a single stadium like every previous opening ceremony, Paris’s show would be arranged along a stretch of the River Seine. The key objectives were the same as ever: get the Olympic flame to the Olympic cauldron, and parade the competing athletes, all in such a way that keeps 1.5 billion viewers from nodding off. But, this being France, there had to be a metatextual boast of its structural innovation. The story of the ceremony began with a video of the torch arriving incorrectly at an empty stade, before Zinedine Zidane turned up to whisk it off to its true destination.
He then passed the torch to a mysterious runner: a masked Frenchman in an 18th-century frock coat. And from here it seemed the opening ceremony’s premises were set. The flame would be parkoured to its final destination by the lost Assassin’s Creed character over rooftop and chimney. Meanwhile the athletes themselves travelled in a fleet of boats downriver (most nations got their own boat, but some had to share). But, for this evening, the Seine was not just any river. Under the command of the French state, it became a miracle of fountains, showering the Olympians as they sailed by. Unfortunately for them, however, what was presumably planned as a decorative sprinkle soon became a deluge, as heavy rainfall swamped the city. National pride briefly swept Britain as images from the sideline showed Keir Starmer in a proper coat, and not one of those awful transparent ponchos. But, for viewers at home, the camera lenses simply wept and smudged.
The Olympians’ procession soon dissolved into something far more boring: watching boatfuls of cagouled athletes waving through rainclouds. And it also drew the worst part of opening ceremony coverage out for as long as possible. As the first barges set off, you could practically hear the creak as our BBC commentators opened their heavy ringbinders of notes and, sounding like lackadaisical sixth formers before a university interview, began to chant national facts as each country sailed by. Did you know, for example, that the Cayman Islands used to be called Las Tortugas? Or, to quickly hurtle to the other end of alphabet (and the end of the endless procession), that the majority of Tajikistan is 10,000 feet above sea level?
Along the way, there were some diversions. There were countless musical and dance acts, including Lady Gaga, a heavy-metal band called Gojira, and excerpts of Bizet and Debussy. And as the masked runner made his way westwards, he triggered various cinematic sequences depicting an aspect of French culture. A chorus from Les Mis was a particular highlight. But others were simply baffling. Why were the Minions from Despicable Me dragged into this? Why were they on a submarine? (A Google search reveals that the original Minions characters – properties of American entertainment giant Comcast via their purchase of NBCUniversal – were created by French animators.)
Around this point, events made a decided turn towards the bizarre. The story of the runner, and effectively the Olympic torch itself, was abandoned, and attention focused on the gantry-like structure of the Debilly Footbridge, not far from the Eiffel Tower. On top, what began as a Parisian fashion tribute soon became a general parade of camp and drag, culminating in the moment that a giant cloche was removed from a platter of flowers to reveal a mostly naked Smurf-man (Dionysus, apparently) who delivered a song to camera. By this point the athletes’ boats had all passed through. But a Eurodancing barge had drifted beneath the footbridge, and the ceremony essentially devolved into the most lavish and well-coordinated boat party Paris had ever seen.
From here, it was a wayward clamber back towards being an opening ceremony. Emmanuel Macron and several Olympic grandees made speeches in the (still pouring) rain. And as athletes and Parisians gathered beneath the Eiffel Tower in disciplined formation, it seemed a moment of coherence was upon us. The masked runner was even found; the flame brought before the crowd. But then a further series of very French narrative contrivances: the mysterious identity of the runner became suddenly redundant as he vanished from the story; and the flame was dispatched not towards the Tower, but on another boat back upriver. Drizzly transit again!
The Parisians did have some final flourishes in store. Céline Dion delivered a stunning rendition of Édith Piaf’s “Hymne à l’Amour” from atop the Eiffel Tower. And, after it had retraced the steps of practically the entire ceremony so far, the torch was taken by a group of French athletes through the Louvre, and from there to the Jardin des Tuileries. There, they found a cauldron that was affixed to a gorgeous spherical hot air balloon (a genuine French invention), which when lit rose some 30 metres in the air. It will hang above the city for the duration of the Games, casting its glow across the skyline.
It was a moment of rare poignancy in an evening that was otherwise half English bank holiday and half rogue club night. Back in the studio with a boosterish Clare Balding, Rebecca Adlington said that it wasn’t her favourite Olympic opening ceremony, even if she admitted it was tarnished by the weather. The event this carnival truly resembled – in its colours, its chaos, and its unyielding but questionable self-confidence – was the Eurovision Song Contest. What was really needed therefore was not a different show, but a different commentator – a Norton or a Wogan, someone who could make sense of it all, or at least dryly mock that which they could not.
The temptation, perhaps unfairly, is to compare this to Britain’s triumph of 12 years ago. Danny Boyle’s “Isles of Wonder” has become easy to mock in the years since, too readily deployed as a shorthand for a kind of populist-centrist Whiggery. But perhaps we needed reminding what these international events can too often be like. In its narrative, pulse and humour, London 2012 is still the opening ceremony to beat.
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