Midnight is approaching. It is pouring rain. A monstrous ship, 85 metres long and 900 tonnes, the liner that has carried hundreds of French athletes, has already docked beyond the Jena bridge, after the barges of the Americans and Australians, the next Olympic hosts – Los Angeles 28th; Brisbane 32nd – and LeBron James proudly holds the mast, his head uncovered at the bow.
The floating discotheque on the Seine, with which the river parade ended, youth united in diversity, hope, sex regardless of gender, has turned off its speakers after Philippe Katerine, decadent Dionysus, warned in song of the arrival of darkness and anguish, countered by the Imagine of John Lennon and Yoko Ono and their light of melancholic harmony in the voice of Juliette Armanet. The DJs have stopped their turntables. Under Pierre de Coubertin’s fleeting gaze, for two seconds on screen, a spectral knight, the gendarme Floriane Issert, in an Olympic cape and armour on a metal horse, rides over the river, messenger of a future of peace and unity symbolised by the flag with the five rings, the history of the Games, for the third time in Paris, Johnny Weismuller, Jesse Owens, Emil Zatopek, Bikila, Wilma Rudolph, Dick Fosbury, Korbut, Spitz, Comaneci, Kozakiewicz and his nod to Moscow, Muhammad Ali lighting the flame in Atlanta 96, hands shaking from Parkinson’s, Luganis, Bolt, Thorpe… flags tangled over the Seine, athletes from all countries mixed together on the catwalk. The anthem has sounded. Emmanuel Macron has declared the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad open. Athletes, coaches and judges take the Olympic oath. The phallic Eiffel Tower shoots out lightning bolts.
The lucid, playful, anxiety-inducing party is over. The most astonishing opening ceremony is approaching its climax under a thick cloud of mystery.
In the centre of the magically illuminated Tuileries Gardens, between the Louvre Pyramid, Concorde and its obelisk, and the Champs-Élysées in the background, a seven-metre-diameter ring has been erected, topped by a gigantic sphere, 30 metres high and 22 metres in diameter. It is a tribute to Montgolfier, Charles and Robert. The principles of applied physics support the great symbol of the Games, the Olympic flame. Towards the cauldron, the legends of sport, who always remember that the Games, our memory, are them, take turns carrying the torch with the flame. During the four hours of the most unexpected ceremony in Olympic history, the mystery was, more than the Seine, more than history and its great ideas, the story line. And the sense of the greatness of the great sportsmen. The biggest stars of world sport, not just Zizou, are happy to join in the game, guest stars from the past and present, Rafa Nadal, Serena Williams, Nadia Comaneci and Carl Lewis, in a powerboat, carry the fire to the obelisk. Supernatureby Cerrone. Tennis player Amelie Mauresmo greets her on the quayside and climbs lightly and in good shape the stairs to the Louvre. She passes to Tony Parker, a Frenchman in the NBA. Eternity, the locals revel in, as they advance through large deserted squares. Charles Coste, who was born in 1924, 100 years ago, and as a cyclist won a gold medal in London 1948, is the penultimate step. From his wheelchair he has the fire, two people, a woman, Marie Jo Pérec, triple Olympic champion (twice in 400m, once in 200m) and the great judoka Teddy Riner, gigantic and triple Olympic champion as well. The choice that leaves no one indifferent.
The grandeur It is ultimately a provincial feeling that translates ironically into big words.blue-white-red, and in images, a curtain of water on the Austerlitz bridge, a winged accordionist and Zinedine Zidane saving the Olympic flame at the Stade de France from the hands of a distracted relay driver, to hand it over, generous god, to three children who travel through the mysteries of Paris, like an adventure film. Clichés turned into winks, caricatures of themselves. Thomas Jolly, the creator of the ceremony, adds the value of feminism, and made it truly great, less of a palette, more universal. The Seine is a Goddess, it is the strength of women, their resistance to violence, the desire for emancipation, freedom. The athletes, on the bow, are freedom guiding the world. The children of the All children with which the river parade begins, they take over the world, turn it into a field of play and joy, and shout, let the party begin. And until not long ago, athletes, soldiers of the homeland, marched along the athletics track, in uniform and marking the same pace.
Olympism on a human scale. The people’s games. The memory of Algerian athletes who throw flowers into the Seine, where hundreds of their compatriots were thrown by the police in 1961. The struggle.
![A balloon carrying the Olympic flame flies over Paris above the Louvre.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/2ZR5ZHVJHRHCNL2WDH456Y6Z5I.jpg?auth=079b71bf3a5cebf876be1be270cb5cbae16ea9aace41990add9aa826003f32b0&width=414)
The day dawns apocalyptic. Organized saboteurs have left half of France without a TGV, and it’s raining in Paris. The Champs Elysees, its uneven cobblestones soaked with water, is deserted except for hundreds of police officers who walk up and down it tirelessly. From Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe. Anxiety on the red carpet that links the Trocadéro grandstand with the Eiffel Tower on the other side, crossed by the Jena bridge over the Seine, the artery through which oxygen, life, and athletes arrive at the heart of the Games. Before them, the famous men and women arrive, some soaked, their haute couture The Frenchman is in a state of disarray, his hat perched askew on his head. As if the apocalypse of chaos and disaster were part of the script, the pre-revolutionary era, perhaps, before the coming of light, Tony Estanguet, the president of the organizing committee, smiles and shouts “Bravo!” “We are proud to have revolutionized the codes of the opening ceremony,” he declares when there are still a couple of hours to go before the first of the 85 barges begins to sail six kilometers to the east, upriver, which at nine kilometers per hour will transport more than 8,000 of the best athletes in the world, 204 flags, 408 flag bearers, men-women, half-and-half, on a sentimental and physical journey through the history of France, and therefore of the world. It is the world history of France. Umbrellas and puddles. Ideas that have made humanity advance, that have freed it from darkness.
The world is a stage set up in her honour. The docks are a frieze between hundreds of thousands of spectators. And Lady Gaga, cabaret star sings, “My feather trick”, my feather suit. Life in pink, Edith Piaf sang, and hundreds of dancers dressed in pink, and the head of Marie Antoinette, in the arms of the decapitated queen, began to sing, shouting, That anger, that anger (this is going, there is no one to stop it), the song of the revolutionaries who guillotine her, converted into a heavy metal-lyrical cacophony, with Gojira and Marina Vioti, which leads to a habanera of Carmen… Meanwhile, the scaffolding of the reconstruction of Notre Dame, destroyed by fire, is a percussion orchestra, the sound of the workers’ and craftsmen’s tools, rhythmic, urgent, while the flame jumps across the roofs of Paris, the route of Quasimodo too. Freedom. The people. The Miserables. Nothing is missing. Equality: Aya Nakamura, from Bamako, Mali, a historic colony, singing to Charles Aznavour, For me, formidable, with a military choir, on the Pont des Arts in front of the Louvre, where, to represent brotherhood, the mysterious masked torchbearer walks through its halls in search of traces following the theft of the Mona Lisa.
![Lady Gaga sings at the opening.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/OXRABM76J5EHTOUXCOSPARCTYI.jpg?auth=3f2f0cf1cfd9832dc9fa5a2de0ca06cbf09334aa3eabf5be28ec28984daa5fa8&width=414)
Before, between Eritrea, led by the green jersey of the Tour, Biniam Girmay, and Estonia, Spain is leaning over the edge of its great ship, with Támara Echegoyen and Marcus Cooper holding the mast. Maurice Ravel is playing, Water games. Alexandre Kantorow, on piano.
The anonymous masked figure stumbles upon the Lumière brothers’ train, ascends to Meliès’ moon and descends into the Nautilus manned and sunk in the Seine by playful Minions. And on the roof of the Grand Palais, the sorority is, of course, La Marseillaise, more emotional than martial, the game of contrasts always, the dramaturgy of the counterpoint, interpreted by the mezzo Axelle Saint-Cirel, whom Dior dresses in tricolour, blue, white, red, and the tail flies seven metres. And sorority is also the memory of great women overshadowed in the stories of history, Alice Milliat, Olympe de Gouges, or so strong that they overcame everything, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Veil. And a choir of 34 women accompanies her, and remembers that finally, 128 years after their refoundation, equal Games are being held.
Who will be the last bearer of fire? In the narrative of the unexpected and the surprising, baroque and funkwhy wouldn’t it be the countertenor and breaking b-boy Jakub Józef Orliński, who plays on the aptly named Alma Bridge Jean Philippe Rameau, his Come, Hymen?
It would have been the apotheosis to end the apocalypse and open the future to hope, but the final choice was not short either. For the first time, two finalists for Celine Dion, who returns to sing in public after almost four years of fighting cancer, with her heart-broken voice, and the memory of Piaf, of course, her hymn to love. I love the whole world… I don’t give a damn about the whole world. Rhinestones, postcards, irony. Let the Games begin. Let the party continue.
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