This wasn’t just an opening ceremony. It was a tour de force of culture and camp
One of the inescapable truths of the business of the Olympic Games is that there is a lot of US broadcast money in it. American television networks have historically poured the most cash into the Olympic coffers, and that money has always translated into the biggest voice at the table.
The net effect has always been Olympic Games that are either packaged perfectly for American TV, or Olympic Games that have consciously packaged only the right kind of local cultural notes, such as giant bouncing kangaroos, because they were precisely what an American television audience expected to see.
For the opening of the summer Games of the 33rd Olympiad, Paris offered an opening ceremony that set itself apart from the very first frame. Unpredictable, sometimes baffling, always artful, it was certainly camp, but it was also visually stunning and unapologetically French.
The show opened with Lady Gaga performing a tribute to French ballet dancer, actor and singer Zizi Jeanmaire, singing Mon Truc en Plumes, accompanied by eight dancers with pink feather fans, on the steps next to the city’s iconic River Seine.
They may have beheaded their last reigning queen, but the French Republic crowned Lady Gaga in a moment that will be written into their history books. “It is my supreme honour to sing for you and cheer you on,” Gaga said. “Your talent is unimaginable. Let the games begin!”
And the show closed with Celine Dion, the Charlemagne, Quebec-born French-Canadian singer, who performed the iconic Edith Piaf song L’Hymne à l’amour.
It was a stunning performance, not just for the gravity of the moment, but because it was Dion’s first concert performance since revealing she is suffering from a rare progressive neurological disorder.
Lady Gaga performs during the athletes’ parade on the River Seine during the opening ceremony.Credit: Getty Images
Dressed simply in white, it was done with characteristic understatement by Dion. Though she is something of a personality in life, on stage she is famous for letting here voice take the spotlight. And she did not disappoint, delivering a feat of vocal athleticism the equal of any gold medallist.
Using the Seine for a boat parade of athletes instead of the traditional stadium walk was a bold decision, but also likely a decision informed by now-ubiquitous security considerations. This is the first modern summer games to break with that convention.
But it was a decision that also offered a different narrative path that took the TV audience on an aerial tour of Paris, one of the world’s truly extraordinary cities, with pauses in unexpected and delightful corners of the French capital, and French national identity.
Accenting it with a visit to the Louvre, to showcase France’s world-leading collection of art, Axelle Saint-Cirel’s stunning retool of The Marseillaise, the haunting tones of Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre and a RuPaul-adjacent Olympic fashion show for the ages, it all became so much greater than the sum of its many moving parts.
Some of it was breathtaking. Some of it was moving. Some of it, such as the “dance representing the turmoils of the evils in the world”, felt wholly Gen Z. And some of it, including a drag-themed recreation of Giovanni Bellini’s painting The Feast of the Gods, initially mistaken as a take on Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, felt both provocative and camp.
And then there was a final half-hour of the torch relay that seemed to take longer than the 1631-and-a-half hours of the torch relay that preceded it.
Inevitably, however, the emotional touchstones are simple: the hopeful smiles and giddy excitement of the world’s best athletes on the eve of a brutal competition in which each of them dreams of draping themselves in glory, and their national flag, on the medal podium.
So the television pictures, from the dancers and the stunning performances from Lady Gaga and Celine Dion, become a sort of colourful window dressing for the human story of grit, endurance and excellence, which is beginning to unfurl itself on the world stage, even if they did have to battle the elements on a wet Paris evening.
As the French say, après la pluie, le beau temps. After the rain, comes the good weather.
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