Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony: How it happened on the Seine

LAdy Gaga opened the artistic part of the show by singing in French, resplendent while reinterpreting a classic of the French revue, My feather thingOlympic athletes smiled, jumped up and down on boats and enjoyed it all, including the steady rain that fell for most of the opening ceremony of the Paris Summer Olympics.

The world hasn’t seen a truly celebratory opening ceremony since 2018, when Tonga’s player took off his jersey — again — in the freezing cold, and South Korea’s fans cheered as the nations paraded at the Pyeongchang Winter Games. The pandemic kept fans away from the ceremonies in Tokyo in 2021 and Beijing in 2022. The world had never seen a procession outside the confines of a stadium, until Friday night’s elaborate spectacle along the Seine.

“This is Paris,” Tony Estanguet, president of the local organizing committee, told TIME before the ceremony. “We’re not going to give them a stadium. We’re going to give them the city.”

France has high hopes for the Olympics, despite a contentious recent general election and uncertainty over the government’s future. The country sees sports as a vehicle for economic and social well-being. President Emmanuel Macron spoke Thursday at an international summit near the Louvre; the French Development Agency has pledged $550 million—and a coalition of public development banks and other financial institutions has committed to investing $10 billion worldwide—for inclusive, sustainable, community-based sports infrastructure by 2030. The Games have put Paris on a greener path: Host bonds have accelerated the cleanup of the Seine and sparked the need for bike lanes to ferry fans and residents to venues in the heart of the city, a fitting Olympic legacy. (Some of the boats ferrying athletes along the river even boasted all-electric engines.)

The Olympic opening ceremony always promises to be a promising time: two weeks of rallying around athletic performance, swimming pool races and vaulting somersaults, that distract from the war between Israel and Gaza, the ongoing bloodshed in Ukraine and other global turmoil. But no sporting event, even one that brings together more than 200 delegations like the Olympics, should be viewed in too favorable a light. The residents of Paris, who are feeling inconvenienced, deserve our attention: In a densely populated city like Paris, the usual grumbling of the Olympic host city’s residents is bound to reach a fever pitch. Rising metro fares, closing stations, special QR codes to access ever-larger portions of the city that were fenced off in the weeks and days leading up to the Games—all of this has sparked outrage. More than 45,000 police and paramilitary forces, backed by some 10,000 military personnel and 20,000 private security personnel, not to mention snipers deployed on the roofs of buildings along the river, helped ensure that the opening ceremony went off without incident. But coordinated fires on France’s high-speed rail network paralyzed transport routes in the hours before the Games: two German show jumpers missed the opening ceremony, a German news agency reported, after their train to Paris stalled; they were forced to turn back in Belgium, according to the Associated Press.

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But opening ceremonies, especially those steeped in centuries of tradition, tend to make the scars fade, at least for a few hours. The historic opening ceremony is the only reason Kadi Kaliuste and Brad Ciccarelli of Toronto made the trip after winning their lottery tickets in 2022. “If we hadn’t gotten the tickets to the opening ceremony, we would have given up on the whole idea (of coming to the Olympics),” Kaliuste says.

At each end of the Pont au Change, one of the many bridges spanning the Seine, spectators enjoyed unique vantage points from riverside buildings, including the Paris Commercial Court, and threw open windows and crowded balconies to get the best view of the festivities and the parade of athletes on the water.

Thierry Olivier travelled from Montpellier in the south of France to attend the historic opening ceremony with his sister Marie Thacle, who lives in Paris. “It’s an honour to be a resident of a country that is able to organise such a ceremony,” said Olivier, who is retired. He was also proud that Paris 2024 was able to make the most of existing facilities. “It’s very positive,” he said. Thacle, also retired, had to put up with the inconvenience of higher metro fares and traffic diversions, but she said “it’s only necessary once (for the Olympics).”

Rosa Maria Trevino came alone from Mexico City to attend the opening ceremony. “I decided to come and I wasn’t going to wait for someone else to jump in the water,” said Trevino, 39, a marketing manager for Heineken in Mexico City near the Alexander III Bridge. “It’s really exciting to be a part of something different.” Mohammad Alhasan, a high-level manager of the Saudi Arabian track and field team, walked west along the Seine River in a green and white tracksuit. “I can’t wait to see the boats,” Alhassan said. “They’re going to be on boats, right?” That was the plan. Asked if his three Saudi Olympians were good swimmers, if things went wrong: “I think so.”

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For spectators who sailed along the Seine, the parade of athletes was a virtual experience for 25 minutes. They saw nothing but an empty river as they watched the first boats – and Lady Gaga – on giant screens. The diversity of the boats carrying the athletes was a testament to the popularity of the Seine as a global attraction. The athletes sailed on everything from motorboats to restaurant boats to boats with dance floors and, of course, the famous tourist Bateaux Mouches. There was even one with a hot tub.

Greek athletes, in keeping with Olympic tradition, led the way on a boat called the Don Juan II, while the small Cambodian boat seemed in danger of capsizing in the current. Some delegations shared space on a boat: Afghanistan, Germany, Albania and South Africa waved to more than 300,000 wet spectators.

Three hours before the opening ceremony began, there was intense commotion along the Seine, as six heavily armed police officers roamed the Avenue de la Motte-Picquet, which runs perpendicular to the Seine. It was unclear whether they were responding to an incident or just warming up for the big event. Sirens wailed as thousands of people waited on the sidewalk, in a line that seemed to stretch all the way to Nice. “It feels like it’s a mile long,” said one exasperated spectator, ready to give up. Security boats continued to ply the river in the hours before the opening ceremony began, and once spectators entered their designated color-coded seating areas along the Seine, they were not allowed to leave — even to find an umbrella to protect themselves from the rain. A mother whose cheeks were painted with the American flag was lucky to get a spot in the umbrella line. She said French organizers got “too aggressive with logistics”: It took her, her husband, and three children (ages 13, 12, and 9) two and a half hours to cross a bridge and through a wave of security barriers to finally get in after the ceremonies began. Then a security official pulled her out of line and her family out of the area — they were apparently in the wrong area — before she could even give her name.

The rain eased off a bit towards the end of the evening, when French football legend Zinedine Zidane took the Olympic flame to the Tracedeiro, across from the Eiffel Tower, and had fun with the athletes he met. Zidane then passed the torch to a surprise guest, Rafael Nadal, the Spanish legend who won 14 French Open tournaments. A nice way for the French to respect the game of a foreigner. Nadal took the flame on a boat with Olympic legends Carl Lewis, Nadia Comanechi and Serena Williams, and returned east across the Seine, stopping at the Louvre.

The French took up the baton: host nation athletes passing the torch included tennis champion Amélie Mauresmo, four-time NBA champion Tony Parker, swimming legend Alain Bernard, former pole vault world record holder Renaud Lavillenie and Charles Costes, the oldest living French Olympic champion, who turned 100 this year: he won cycling gold in 1948. French sprint star Marie-José Pérec and judoka Teddy Riner lit the flame in the Jardin des Tuileries, next to the Louvre.

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The highly anticipated lighting of the Olympic cauldron was sealed in history by a serenade from the Eiffel Tower that represented the triumphant return of Canadian superstar Celine Dion from French-speaking Quebec. Dion chose “L’Hymne à l’Amour,” the love song written by French icon Édith Piaf describing her love for professional boxer Marcel Cerden, an appropriate subject given the context. It was Dion’s first time singing in public after being diagnosed in 2022 with stiff person syndrome, a neurological disorder that causes uncontrollable spasms that she said left her unable to walk, breathe at times, much less sing. Draped in white, Dion appeared to have lost none of her magnificent vocal range as she added to the historic character of the opening ceremony in a performance that French media called breathtaking.

Celine Dion’s ballad capped off an evening of pomp and circumstance, with some frustration. But in the end, Paris gave us an Olympic opening concert that we will all remember. Paris pulled off a coup.