Bad weather did nothing to diminish the singular, moving quality of the Paris 2024 opening ceremony. There could be no more beautiful stage than the banks of the Seine; no stadium could reproduce that accumulation of history.
01The Seine · Paris
The city as stage
A city is far larger and more complex than a stadium, yet this crowded production never lacked detail. That alone showed its quality. There were delays, but no disorder. The BBC called it the most difficult, most complex broadcast ever undertaken anywhere — a measure of director Thomas Jolly’s astonishing command of the event.
At Ubisoft’s home, an Assassin’s Creed-style parkour torch relay stirred fond memories for many rooftop trespassers. When the soprano began La Marseillaise from the roof of the Grand Palais and statues of outstanding women in French history slowly rose beside the river, the ceremony marked the first Olympic Games with equal numbers of women and men among the athletes. It gave me goosebumps. The French Revolution sequence did not evade the price of freedom: blood-red fireworks against heavy metal portrayed conflict directly, creating what will surely remain one of the classic Olympic opening-ceremony performances.
It is also rare for athletes from other countries to take part in an opening ceremony’s torch relay. When Zidane passed the torch to Nadal, the Spanish friends who had been complaining a second earlier about the drawn-out French relay immediately fell silent in respect.
02Sport as public story
The five Ps
An opening ceremony is always an opportunity for national public relations. Paris had plenty of that, but its details also allowed viewers to feel affection for the event, for the city and for the generous side of human nature. As one of the speeches later said — the first Olympic opening speech I had listened to closely in years — this was more than an opening ceremony. It was a story about love, and about responsibility for carrying the Olympic inheritance forward.
Beyond tactics and technique, the commercial model of sport still returns to storytelling. The Olympics have always been a gold mine for sporting narratives; no other event yet matches their complexity, richness or scale. There is only one winner, but the winner is not the only person with a story.
What principle guides the work, in what place, with what people, around what product, and through what production? Whatever the medium — print, Douyin or even Roblox — stories that audiences and clients genuinely need must still be built on those five Ps, rather than produced merely to fill space. Technology should help us tell the strongest stories and make content creation more resilient and scalable amid abundance, not merely display something cool.
As the writer is gradually replaced by the content creator, finding meaning in creation beyond commercial targets becomes more important.
03Paris 2024
Between spectacle and the sublime
However beautiful an opening ceremony may be, it remains a fig leaf over the problems of France and the Olympics themselves. Yet the French explored, with extraordinary confidence, the space between pandering and the sublime, frenzy and humour, irritating wokeness and sincere universalism, farce and grandeur, the noise of nightlife and the splendour of painting. The result was an opening ceremony unlike any other, and my personal favourite.
04A pioneer restored to view
Alice Milliat
The accompanying image showed Alice Milliat, a once-forgotten pioneer of women’s sport. A century ago she campaigned to bring women’s athletics into the Olympic Games, organised four Women’s World Games and helped develop women’s football in France. It was a pleasure to see the Paris ceremony place her among the honoured figures.
Readers in Britain can look for the recently published biography La Vie Jamais Racontée: Alice Milliat, a French Heroine and Sporting Suffragette. I recommend it.