The Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony was an unplanned “weather disaster”

The Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony was an unplanned “weather disaster”

They’ve been preparing for the Olympics for years, but organizers couldn’t prevent rain from disrupting the festivities.

PARIS – Golfer Shane Lowry summed it up this way as he prepared to raise the Irish flag at the Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony.
“The weather’s been a bit catastrophic,” he said. “We brought the Irish weather with us.”

I wish he’d forgotten about the weather and brought a bit of craic instead.

I found myself nostalgic for those warm summer evenings in London 12 years ago, when Danny Boyle’s wry interpretation of Britishness captivated the world and set the tone for an Olympics that, for the most part, didn’t take itself too seriously. But the one thing you can’t control at the Olympics is the weather, although the Chinese organisers reportedly did so in Beijing in 2008 to limit rainfall.

I’m flying the British flag at the Olympics, but my life is a disaster!

These measures have some pretty dubious environmental implications, so it’s hard to blame the organisers for getting too wet on the night, but you certainly shouldn’t expect a contingency plan: athletes who signed up to spend 90 minutes on a barge, I would have expected some kind of cross. Hundreds of thousands of people along the Seine and in the stands near the Eiffel Tower may have thought the same.

And this despite the fact that Paris organisers cancelled the tournament’s opening press conference on Friday morning, apparently because of the weather forecast, to make “final pre-arrangements”. If they didn’t have a rain contingency plan at that point, it was unlikely they would have come up with one in eight hours.
There was some rain protection, but coincidentally it only covered the first few rows of the VIP stand, so French President Emmanuel Macron and International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach didn’t have to don a transparent poncho. Keir Starmer was one level below VIP and surrounded by sweaty, plastic-clad dignitaries, but he put in an impressive performance in a simple Team GB raincoat.

Even more impressive, as the sun went down and the French delegation stepped onto the wet, icy banks of the Seine for the last time, they were still smiling. Artistic director Thomas Jolly said he wanted various elements of the ceremony to be “a bit surprising but also very French, if you know what I mean,” to nod to cliches but also to push them aside. His message, unfortunately, was washed out by the rain, making it hard to discern any meaning. Any opening ceremony is a feat of logistics of course. There were 20,000 people mobilised on the day including 2,000 artists, and another 320,000 fans in attendance, making it the best attended opening ceremony of all-time. While the train chaos meant some people missed the opening ceremony, I managed to get a ticket, and my colleague who missed the Eurostar may have just avoided being soaked and cold. Top 10 gold medal hopes for Team GB at Paris 2024 Olympics

Organisers had hoped that water, rather than rain, would dominate the opening ceremony along the six kilometre stretch of the Seine, but Jolie was keen to explain that the river was created when Bacchus’ daughter Secan turned into water to escape an attack by Neptune.
The story has become even more outlandish since plans for an opening ceremony along the Seine were first mentioned, especially with security forces having sealed off the city centre since mid-May. A celebrity swarm added a much-needed air of stardom to an otherwise somber evening. The usual heads of state were overshadowed by the arrival of former Chelsea striker Didier Drogba, singer John Legend and tennis legend Serena Williams, who memorably answered interview questions in masterful French. Zinedine Zidane also played a Rowan Atkinson-esque character in an opening pre-recorded comedy sketch, in which he carried the torch from an empty Stade de France to Paris’ iconic subway, only to then very comically fail. It may be an oversimplification to call the opening ceremony a damp squib, given that the sun barely shines most of the year in Britain, but it was true: at least no ships were sunk.