Key events
My colleague Sean Ingle is – unlike me – actually in Paris, and he has written this evening about the prospects for Team GB …
I see in the comments people questioning the absence of Australia. Rest assured, you haven’t missed them. The final three delegations are Australia (2032 hosts), USA (2028 hosts) and then France (hosts).
The next bunch of barges being featured go from Japan to Madagascar, and then Jakub Józef Orliński will perform. After that there are another 24 barges due, and after that another 70. We will be here for a while yet.
New Zealand breaking out the rhyming couplets on social media here …
The next section is about the history of sport in France and I feel certain one thing that won’t get mentioned is that the denouement of the Tour de France this year got bumped from Paris to Nice for the first time ever because of the Olympics.
Golden statues of ten women from France’s history are rising out now. The organisers were at pains to point out that in Paris there are about 260 statues of men, and just 40 or so statues of women. This is an attempt to redress the balance. They include figures born from the 1700s to Simone Veil, who campaigned for abortion rights, and who died as recently as 2017. The statues will be offered to the city afterwards in a bid to give them a permanent home.
I have found the Despicable Me franchise to be a series of diminishing returns after the first one was great. However, maybe I’m easily pleased, but the Minions doing slapstick Olympics while evoking every French stereotype possible has made me laugh a lot there. Immediately followed by The Marseillaise being sung by mezzo-soprano Axelle Saint-Cirel. You wouldn’t say there had been a consistent tone, would you?
A huge fan of any Olympic opening ceremony that includes the Lumière brothers’ train actually bursting out of the screen. This is a great little sequence referencing films, and then the Minions turn up! Did they just say “Ooh la la!”?
Shane Lowry and Sarah Lavin are carrying the flag for Ireland. They are sharing a barge with Iraq. The boat ahead carried Iran. The boat behind carries Israel. You imagine the organisers may have done quite a bit of spreadsheet juggling about boat capacity to end up with that result.
The next section is going to be “a tribute to the art of filmmaking and French science fiction”. Meanwhile the mysterious hooded flame bearer has discovered the Mona Lisa has been stolen, which is actually also the plot of a 1970s Doctor Who story written by Douglas Adams. The Lumière brothers’ moving pictures and Georges Meliès’ A Trip To The Moon are going to be referenced.
Great Britain, Grenada, Guam and Guatemala are sharing the next barge. It looks like it is absolutely tipping it down in Paris now.
Here is that mysterious torch bearer making their way through the Louvre.
Meanwhile on the television coverage it is the music of Claude Debussy and we have got up to countries that start with the letter ‘E’. That may give you a clue as to how much more of the ceremony is to go.
Here are some more pictures as the evening unfolds …
Next up is a section in the Louvre, with the mysterious flame bearer. They took the torch from the children, who took the torch from Zinedine Zidane. Are you following? The mysterious torch holder looks like they have escaped from a French edition of Assassin’s Creed, and appears to be the main developing subplot of the ceremony. Will they get the flame to the cauldron to be lit in time. Probably, it would be a bit of bad planning if they didn’t.
The official Olympic social media channel is highlighting a quote from Victor Hugo to go with the last section on equality – “The freedom to love is no less sacred than the freedom to think”.
Aya Nakamura, the most-streamed French-speaking artist in the world, is here. She will be singing with 60 musicians of the Republican Guard and 36 choristers of the French Army. We are on the Pont des Arts for this segment, which is themed around equality and celebrating the modern French language.
While we are watching the opening ceremony some world leaders have obviously got their phones out. Justin Trudeau and Narendra Modi have been giving shout outs to their delegations.
Team Canada, this is your moment.
Good luck to all of our athletes at the #Paris2024 Olympic Games. We’ll be cheering you on from back home. 🇨🇦— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) July 26, 2024
Only in an Olympic opening ceremony can you go from the metal of Gojira to Marina Viotti singing opera from Carmen in the space of a couple of minutes.
The cathedral bells have been ringing out. This approach to the ceremony is really showing off Paris landmarks. The next segment is called Liberté, and refers back to the French Revolution. Rock music! Cannons belching fire! Beheaded women in the castle windows! This is how to do history!
There is an original music composition now based around the restoration of the Notre Dame Cathedral, damaged in a fire in 2019. The dance sequence features construction workers, and the side of the building is covered in a spectacular gold tinsel dressing, and musicians are playing from the windows on the opposite side of the Seine. The Olympic flame is now being carried, parkour-style, across Paris rooftops.
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As an aside, I think the number of times anybody ever gets to cover an Olympic opening ceremony in a live blog and go “They just went past the bridge where I proposed in 2002!” are very small, so I am going to take advantage of this one. They just went past the bridge where I proposed in 2002!
If you had “people do the can-can on the banks of the River Seine, but it is an updated modern thumping beats version of the music” on your opening ceremony bingo card, you can tick it off now.
It is too early to call this ceremony reinvention as a success or failure. Traditionally the Olympic opening ceremony was amazing spectacular music and theatre for 45 minute to an hour, then there was a bit of a lull while the parade took a long, long time, followed by some speeches and the flame-lighting. This is an attempt to mix it up, but I must confess it is a little difficult to know where to look at times, and so far it has lacked an over-arching narrative thread beyond getting the flame from the Stade de France to the Trocadéro.
While the boat parade continues, the children who took the Olympic flame from Zinedine Zidane in the broken down Metro train earlier – what a sentence to type – are now also part of a parade alongside the river. There is so much to look at. Everyone along the river in this section is wearing pink, representing La vie en rose.
I am reliably informed that Lady Gaga was performing Mon truc en plumes originally by Zizi Jeanmaire.
Here are a few pictures showing what the opening ceremony looks like so far …
Lady Gaga is singing in French which is already drawing some slightly mixed reviews on social media for her accent. This seems to set the format for what we are going to have though, which is that as the barges carrying the athletes hit certain parts on the route, performances start. Lady Gaga is on a golden stage by the banks of the river.
LADY GAGA!*
[*this was quite heavily rumoured]
The organisers did promise something unique, and it already feels like if you are at the side of the river in Paris, as when watching the Tour de France or Formula One, you are going to only get to see a short slither of the action. Meanwhile, if you are watching on television, it is positively whizzing by.
We are up to Argentina. Presumably they are hoping to avoid a two-hour VAR-inclusive delay tonight, the likes of which featured in their opening game in the men’s football tournament on Wednesday.
Quite a lot of countries crammed on the next barge, including South Africa, Algeria and Germany. This is going much faster than your usual parade around the stadium.
The Greek barge has departed to begin the procession of athletes. Greece always goes first due to the origins of the Olympic Games. There are water cannon and fireworks going off, someone playing an accordion while wearing angel wings sitting on the edge of a bridge, and I am not going to lie, there is *A LOT* all going on at once here. The IOC refugee team departs second.
The ceremony now shows IOC president Thomas Bach and France’s president Emmanuel Macron greeting each other at the Trocadéro, where the formalities will take place late. The Pont d’Austerlitz has been engulfed in the colours of the Tricolour.
With some irony, given the huge transport disruption in Paris today, the opening sequence sees Zinedane Zidane stuck on a Metro train with the power cut out, and a group of youths have come to the rescue, taking the Olympic flame from the train, through the Paris catacombs, to the underground waterways of France’s capital city.
Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony begins
The Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony has begun with a video interlude showing people delivering the Olympic flame to an empty Stade de France, only to realise that the ceremony is at the River Seine. Footbal legend and World Cup winner Zinedine Zidane is being shown hurtling the flame to the correct location.
Franco-Malian singer Aya Nakamura, the most listened to French-speaking singer in the world is confirmed to be performing at some point in the ceremony. If you want a flavour of what she sounds like, Nakamura put out a new single, 42, last month, although it remains to be seen whether she will go down the George Michael 2012 closing ceremony route of “Here’s my new single …”
In April, after rumours that she would appear had drawn ire from far-right politicians including Marine Le Pen and Gérard Larcher, Nakamura thanked fans for their support.
By the way, if you are up for signing up for newsletters, it would be remiss of me not to mention our Paris 2024 daily briefing. Running throughout the Olympics and Paralympics it will be a guide to the day’s highlights and the best that is yet to come. Sign up for free here.
You can also find our complete schedule for the Games here.
Pssst. It isn’t all boats and fashion and fireworks. There is actually going to be a lot of sport over the next fortnight too. Elsie Grover-Jones has this explainer on something I’m not entirely sure I’d ever thought about before. She asks What will make the Paris 2024 Olympic swimming pool fast or slow?
The swimming gets under way tomorrow, with four gold medals on offer by the end of the day.
One of the features of Olympic opening ceremonies is the fashion focus on the uniforms that competitors have been given to wear. Team USA have raised some eyebrows by pairing what looks like a very traditional red and white edged blue jacket with a blue-striped shirt and … jeans?
There are 85 boats due on the water today, and 30 of them will be electric boats. The River Seine was the location of the testing of the first ever electric boat, in 1881 by a Parisian inventor named Gustave Trouvé.
The Team GB flag-bearers tonight are diver Tom Daley and rower Helen Glover. They spoke to the BBC.
Daley said he felt “honoured”, telling viewers in the UK:
I remember walking out in 2008, behind Mark Foster, and thinking about how cool that was just to be part of a ceremony like that. Now to be going into a fifth Games and being able to start off in this fashion, it’s pretty, pretty special.
I mean, in our team meeting just before we came here, performance director said, you know, being an Olympic champion is a very elite group, but then to become flagbearers as well is an even smaller group. So I feel very honoured, and it’s going to be a special evening.
Glover said similar:
It is a real honour, because we have an incredible Team GB, and they are going to do some of the most amazing performances in the next two weeks. So to be leading them out to start the Games together. It is a real honour.
Each week our Saturday edition newsletter has a message from our editor-in chief Katharine Viner, and in tomorrow’s newsletter she sets out some of the challenges facing Paris 2024, and the Guardian’s reporting on them:
The run up to the Paris Games was dominated by political upheaval in the host nation, where a surging far-right was deflected at the last moment in snap parliamentary elections. Paris correspondent Angelique Chrisafis wrote about hopes across France that the greatest sporting show on Earth can help unite a fractured nation. With luck it can bring some unity to a fractured planet, too. As sports writer Andy Bull put it: this is a Games that has been reframed by the shadow of conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East.
There certainly wasn’t a great deal of fraternité in the last few days before the Games kicked off. This morning, France’s rail system was left in chaos after a massive coordinated attack on the TGV network. Before that, there was a Russian spy scandal, with a 40-year-old chef arrested on suspicion of plotting with a foreign power to stage “large scale” acts of “destabilisation” during the Games. There was a sporting spy scandal, too, with defending women’s football champions Canada caught using drones to spy on their opponents. Then there was chaos in the men’s tournament during a Morocco v Argentina match that managed to include a pitch invasion, the fallout from a racism scandal and even a two-hour wait for a VAR decision. And Charlotte Dujardin – a British multiple medal winner – was forced to pull out of the equestrian event after a distressing video of her repeatedly whipping a horse emerged on Tuesday.
Elsewhere, the Guardian went on location with the Refugee Team in training and profiled boxer Cindy Ngamba, the team’s flagbearer. Simon Hattenstone interviewed GB cycling great Victoria Pendleton who spoke about being crushed by the pressure of the sport that made her name. We also met surfer Sam Sills, who lived in a van on his way to Olympic recognition; gymnast Becky Downie who exposed abuse in her sport; the 2012 gold medal winner Etienne Stott who is now a climate activist and spent time with the Ukrainian swimming team in training as the bombs fell.
You can sign up for the Guardian Saturday Edition newsletter here.
Which order will countries appear in the Olympic opening ceremony parade?
Well, that is a very good question. One of the joys/terrors of covering an Olympic opening ceremony live is that everybody is very tight-lipped about it in advance. There are certain protocols – but protocols are there to be upended.
What we expect is that Greece will lead the athletes parade as is tradition, paying respect to the origins of the Olympic Games. It has then become usual for those in the IOC Refugee Olympic team to go second.
France will come last, as hosts. We expect the two teams in front of them to be Australia (as hosts in 2032) and the US (as hosts in 2028).
The rest of the countries and territories are then sandwiched in between those, in alphabetic order in French. Germany, for example, will be in with the ‘A’ boats as Allemagne, rather than ‘G’ for Germany or indeed ‘D’ for Deutschland.
There is a caveat though. It has been suggested that the smaller delegations might share boats, so some places that are only sending one or two competitors, like Andorra, Belize, the Cook Islands, Liechtenstein, Mauritania, Nauru, Somalia and Tuvalu, might become wild cards.
The route goes from Pont d’Austerlitz in the east of Paris to the Pont d’léna, in the west, between the Eiffel Tower and Trocadéro Esplanade.
Welcome to the Paris Olympic Games 2024 opening ceremony
Bonjour! Salut! Bienvenue! Hello! Γειά σου! Welcome to our live coverage of the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games 2024!
Opening ceremonies don’t make or break a Games as being considered a success, but can certainly set the tone, and often are the moment a host nation gets the Olympic spirit and gets behind hosting the Games.
Paris 2024 is promising a unique spectacle, as the for the first time the ceremony is a parade through the city, on a 6km route on the River Seine, rather than being stadium-bound.
It was an imaginative part of the city’s bid to host the Games, but has also become fraught with complexity, with residents complaining about large parts of the city being sealed off during the preparations, and security concerns meaning the promise of large crowds thronging the banks of the river have been scaled down.
Nevertheless, with the world’s eys on it, we are expecting a great show. We will bring you the best pictures, analysis and reaction as it all unfolds from 7pm BST tonight. My colleague David Hills has five things to look out for …