Pinned
Andrew Keh
Reporting from Paris
The Paris Games, after a night of rain and drama, are open.
The Paris Olympics opened under tight security and rainy skies on Friday, only hours after a coordinated arson attack brought France’s national rail system to a standstill and rattled nerves in a city already on edge.
French organizers have spent years planning the country’s showcase moment, and it was a masterpiece of history and surprise, kitsch and sports, art and fashion — all highlighted by a sprawling boat parade that ferried nearly 7,000 athletes along a route almost four miles long and that was book ended by performances by Lady Gaga and Celine Dion.
The route, past monuments and under bridges, celebrated the city itself as an Olympic venue, and helped France cap a day of celebration that had begun ominously: with fires that the authorities said were deliberately set to disrupt the start of the Games — a reminder of the limits of years of preparations and more than 50,000 policemen.
Here’s what else to know:
NBC and Peaco*ck aired the ceremony live and will show it again at 7:30 p.m. Eastern. For the first time, it was held not inside the barricaded confines of a stadium but on the Seine. The N.B.A. star LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers and the tennis star Coco Gauff served as flag bearers for the United States. Gojira, a leading French heavy metal band, became the first hard rock act to perform in an Olympics opening ceremony when it did a metal version of “Ah! Ça Ira,” a song that was popular during the French Revolution.
A series of arson attacks on France’s rail network on Friday disrupted service on three high-speed rail lines — the Atlantic, Northern and Eastern lines — with many trains canceled, the railway company, S.N.C.F., said in a statement. The fires, which were set in pipes carrying cables used for signaling and have been described as “criminal,” were all detected around 4 a.m. local time, according to Patrice Vergriete, France’s transportation minister.
No one was killed or reported injured, but the damage to France’s high-speed train lines caused major delays as thousands of local and international travelers were headed to Paris for the ceremony and the Games.
Amélie Oudéa-Castera, France’s minister for sports and the Olympics, said the authorities were still evaluating whether athletes’ transportation would be affected over the weekend. Train service is expected to be affected through Monday, interrupting plans for more than a million people, including French vacationers, Olympic athletes and tourists. The S.N.C.F. advised travelers to postpone their trips if possible.
Aurelien Breeden, Andrew Das, Catherine Porter and Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.
Jason Farago
Gaga and Celine, Eurodisco and ballroom voguers, drag queens posed like the apostles in the Last Supper, the quays of the Seine covered in pink, and a throuple cruising one another in the national library: Thomas Jolly’s ceremony promised to be grandiose, but it was also a festival of queer Paris, looking fabulous in the rain. Politicians from the far right denounced the ceremony before it even began. And in the midst of an ongoing political crisis, this ceremony made clear what sort of France it believes in.
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Aurelien Breeden
Reporting from Paris
Gérald Darmanin, France's interior minister, exulted on X that “WE DID IT!” Organizing the opening ceremony was a huge logistical challenge and security headache, and many critics had questioned its feasibility. Darmanin and other top officials can celebrate now that it went off without a major hitch. But on Saturday the Games start in earnest — and with them the possibility of other things going wrong.
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The map highlights the route of the Olympics Opening Ceremony along the Seine River in Paris, from its start at the Austerlitz Bridge, and west to the finish at the Iéna Bridge. It also locates some of the official Games venues, such as the Place de la Concorde, the Grand Palais, and the Trocadéro.
avE. des
champs-ÉlysÉes
1/2 mile
Stade de France
2nd arr.
Place de la
Concorde
Grand
Palais
8th arr.
1st arr.
Tuileries
Garden
Trocadéro
Seine
3rd arr.
Louvre
FINISH
Iéna Bridge
Esplanade
des Invalides
4th arr.
Eiffel
Tower
ROUTE
OF THE
OPENING
CEREMONY
7th arr.
Île de la Cité
Île Saint-Louis
Paris
6th arr.
15th arr.
START
Austerlitz Bridge
France
Official Games venues
JARDIN DES
PLANTES
5th arr.
Grand
Palais
1/2 mile
Place de la
Concorde
Trocadéro
Seine
Louvre
FINISH
Île Saint-
Louis
ROUTE
OF THE
OPENING
CEREMONY
Iéna
Bridge
Eiffel
Tower
Île de
la Cité
Paris
France
START
Austerlitz Bridge
Official Games venues
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James Poniewozik
“I can’t talk,” says the NBC commentator Kelly Clarkson, shaken up with emotion at Celine Dion’s performance. And this is indeed one of those moments when the music — and the images of Paris glowing by night — say all that needs to be said.
Catherine Porter
Reporting from Paris
French TV presenter Daphné Bürki, who worked on the show with Thomas Jolly overseeing the costumes, has been in tears through much of the show, as a commentator on France 2 television. She ended the show in a puddle.
Aurelien Breeden
Reporting from Paris
Is that hot-air balloon anchored somewhere, or is someone piloting it? At first it looked like it would just float away, but it appears to now be stationary
Aurelien Breeden
Reporting from Paris
It does in fact look like the hot-air balloon is tethered to the ground.
Jon Pareles
Celine Dion closes the opening ceremony with a triumphant return to stage.
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The stakes could not have been higher for Celine Dion’s first public performance since 2020. After canceling tour dates, in 2022 she announced that she was suffering from a rare neurological disorder known as stiff person syndrome, which causes muscle spasms, including constrictions of her vocal cords. “I Am: Celine Dion,” the documentary released this year, showed her struggling to sing at a recording session.
Her performance at the Olympics opening ceremony was a song from Edith Piaf, the petite, tangy-voiced, dramatic and quintessentially French chanson singer who was nicknamed “the Little Sparrow.” The song, “Hymne à l’amour,” envisions a love that outlasts the end of the world, and it’s the kind of soaring, swelling, long-breathed anthem that Dion used to belt to the rafters.
Like sports, singing has a demanding physicality of its own. Dion faced a live, real-time test with a worldwide audience.
And in a long, white glittering dress, she seized her moment. She relied on subtlety along with lung power. Perhaps her voice was a little scratchier, at times, than before her illness. But the drama of the moment was matched by the dynamics of her performance, rising to an unaccompanied peak before a triumphant final phrase. Yes, she nailed the landing.
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Vanessa Friedman
Chief fashion critic
Celine Dion brings it all to a close in a Dior dress covered in “thousands of pearls and more than 500 meters of fringing.” She looks like a sort of angelic showgirl, glowing from the innards of the Eiffel Tower.
Andrew Das
Reporting from Paris
Teddy Riner, a judoka seeking a medal at his fifth straight Olympics, and Marie-José Pérec, a three-time gold medalist in track and field, get the honors for lighting the cauldron.
Andrew Das
Reporting from Paris
The group of runners is now headed by three French Paralympians, trailed now by Amélie Mauresmo and Tony Parker in the darkness and spotlights as they pass from the Louvre to the Tuileries. Two French handball athletes take the torch from them. The group keeps getting bigger, and the emptiness and the wet path and the growing group of legends make this really a terrific presentation.
Talya Minsberg
Reporting from Paris
I like this as an advertisem*nt for running in Paris. Fantastic running city.
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Elisabeth Vincentelli
In France, people are so proud of French players in the N.B.A. that they referred to the San Antonio Spurs as “Tony Parker’s team,” just like the Minnesota Timberwolves are now “Rudy Gobert’s team.”
Aurelien Breeden
Reporting from Paris
There is something strangely poetic about Tony Parker, the French former N.B.A. player, and Amélie Mauresmo running alone in a near-empty Louvre courtyard.
Andrew Das
Reporting from Paris
The speedboat legends hand off to Amélie Mauresmo, a French former tennis champion.
Talya Minsberg
Reporting from Paris
That boat is going FAST. Serena Williams and Nadia Comaneci almost fell over and caught each other.
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Jon Pareles
One more serving of disco fromage: Cerrone’s 1977 hit “Supernature” accompanies the torch’s boat ride. It’s a song about nature taking revenge on mankind for wrecking the environment. But it pumps!
Andrew Das
Reporting from Paris
Nadal to Serena to Nadia Comaneci to Carl Lewis. This is a boat of legends.
Vanessa Friedman
Chief fashion critic
I have to say, the life jacket Serena Williams is wearing on the motor boat is important — safety first! — but it’s kind of ruining her dress effect.
James Poniewozik
The producers proving an old rule of entertainment: If you’ve got an Eiffel Tower, flaunt it.
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Andrew Das
Reporting from Paris
Zidane hands on off to Rafael Nadal, the Spanish tennis champion. This all has the feel of a relay of great athletes.
Andrew Das
Reporting from Paris
Zinedine Zidane, a French-Algerian soccer star and World Cup winner, strolls out to cheers and — gasp! — takes the torch from the masked figure we’ve been following all night.
Aurelien Breeden
Reporting from Paris
President Emmanuel Macron officially declares the Games open.
Andrew Das
Reporting from Paris
Thomas Bach, the International Olympic Committee president: “Vive les Jeux Olympique, vive la France.”
Wet athletes: “Let’s gooooo.”
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James Poniewozik
A few hours into the ceremony, as the cameras cut from the speeches to tight shots of the drenched athletes, you get the sense that braving this rain has been an endurance event for everyone.
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Aurelien Breeden
Reporting from Paris
“The most beautiful treasures of our national heritage will be your playground,” Tony Estanguet says, referring to the fact that some of the most famous monuments and areas in the French capital, like the Grand Palais or the Eiffel Tower, have become staging areas for Olympic events.
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Talya Minsberg
Reporting from Paris
Sunny recorded scenes peek through the rainy festivities.
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If you are looking for clues as to what was recorded before the opening ceremony, look for the rain.
It’s pretty slippery in Paris, and many of the taped segments were shot on a clear day, when dancers did not need to work as diligently to stay balanced as they did Friday.
Also keep an eye on the character identified only as “the mysterious torchbearer,” the masked person leading us through some unusual scenes in an attempt to weave a story that will make the most sense to the opening ceremony organizers.
He’s based on a number of masked characters who have “left their mark on French culture,” according to the program for the opening ceremony. They include Ezio from the Assassin’s Creed video game in addition to Belphégor, the Iron Mask, the Phantom of the Opera and Fantomas.
There are dancers, there’s art, there’s some black-and-white footage, and there are minions. Yes, minions. (Pierre Coffin, a French Indonesian animator, helped invent the yellow animated creatures and has supplied their voices for nearly 15 years.)
A few more examples of scenes that were filmed before it started pouring in Paris: parts of a segment titled “Synchronicity,” written by Victor le Masne, showed dancers performing in the scaffolding of Notre-Dame. That gold medal welding? Taped, until we were taken back to real time as a suitcase — with the medals, of course — was taken down a set of stairs in the rain. That scene in the library with a possible ménage a trois? That was taped, too.
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Vanessa Friedman
Chief fashion critic
fashion review
Team U.S.A. is wearing navy blazers — again.
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What does it mean to dress to represent the United States?
As far as Ralph Lauren is concerned, it appears to mean wearing a navy blazer.
Yes, the Americans will be wearing navy blazers yet again as they make their Olympic entrance. This is the fifth Summer Games for which Ralph Lauren has been the official outfitter of the American delegation, and the fifth time he has designed a navy blazer for the Summer Games. Plus ça change and all that.
In 2008, the blazer was single-breasted, with white buttons to match the white newsboy caps and white trousers (very “Brideshead Revisited” with an American twist). In 2012, the blazer was double- or single-breasted, worn with matching navy berets, white pants or skirts and, for women, a red, white and blue scarf that gave the look a sort of regimental air.
By 2016, the blazer was single-breasted again, with skinny white jeans and a red, white and blue striped T-shirt that inspired unfortunate comparisons to the Russian flag. And for the last Summer Games, in Tokyo in 2021, the navy blazer was worn with sneakers, a nautical blue-and-white striped tee and dark blue denim pegged-leg jeans, some cuffed at the ankle.
This time around, the jacket is single-breasted, with red-and-white grosgrain ribbon trim. The shirt is a blue-and-white striped oxford, the jeans are faded and relaxed, and the shoes are white bucks. (Men also have a navy tie.)
In the pantheon of navy blazers, it is less yacht club, more private-school boy with a naughty streak — but still suffused with somewhat outmoded prepster déjà vu.
Tradition and consistency have always been part of the Ralph Lauren sell, whether it is on the runway or in stores. So have the uniforms of WASP fantasy. But at this point, especially given the criticism that the navy blazer attracted during the Tokyo Games and the complicated associations with exclusion and privilege it can evoke — viewers compared the athletes to a team of Karens or people “on vacation in Newport” — you’d think the company would have tried a new approach.
Instead, it doubled down on the old one. America is a bigger, more chaotic place than the country club. Why default to banality?
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Aurelien Breeden
The Olympic medals will have a piece of the Eiffel Tower.
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Athletes who win medals at the 2024 Summer Olympics and Paralympics in Paris won’t just win gold, silver or bronze. Their medals will also include a piece of iron — wrought-iron, to be exact, from the Eiffel Tower itself.
Each of the 5,084 medals created for the Paris events will be decorated on one side with a hexagon-shaped piece of iron recovered from the French capital’s iconic landmark, organizers said.
“This exceptional object had to meet another very strong symbol of our country and our capital,” Tony Estanguet, the president of the Paris 2024 organizing committee, said in February.
Mr. Estanguet said the iron used in the medals will be recycled fragments from the Eiffel Tower’s original 1889 construction that had been sitting unused in a warehouse after renovation work.
Stripped of their brown paint and polished, each fragment will weigh 18 grams, or just over half an ounce, and be fashioned into a hexagon — the shape of France.
The hexagons, stamped with “Paris 2024” and the logo of the Games, were set into the medal with claws shaped like the Eiffel Tower’s rivets, using a technique similar to that employed to affix precious gemstones in jewelry. Ridges of radiating lines that are designed to reflect light, a nod to Paris’s nickname as the City of Light, surround the hexagons.
“We wanted this medal to be beautiful, we wanted it to be symbolic, and what is more symbolic than bringing back home a piece of France’s heritage,” Martin Fourcade, a five-time Olympic champion who also is president of the Paris 2024 Athletes’ Commission, said.
The designs on the other side of the Olympic medals — which are made of recycled metal and must follow precise specifications imposed by the International Olympic Committee — will vary. They will include traditional symbols of the Games, including of Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, as well as the Athens Acropolis — along with an engraving of the Eiffel Tower.
The medals for the Paralympic Games will be different, with a low-angle view from beneath the Eiffel Tower, and the words “Paris” and “2024” written in Braille — the written system for visually impaired people that is named after the Frenchman Louis Braille.
