What It Was Like on the Seine During the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony

Lady Gaga opened up the artistic portion of the show by singing in French, resplendent while reinterpreting a classic from the French revue, Mon truc en plume. Olympians smiled and bounced up and down on boats and soaked it all in—including the steady rain that fell during most of the Paris Summer Olympics opening ceremony.

The world hasn’t witnessed a truly festive opening ceremony since 2018, when the guy from Tonga took his shirt off—again—that time in the freezing cold, and fans from South Korea cheered the parade of nations at the Pyeongchang Winter Games. The pandemic kept fans away from ceremonies in Tokyo in2021 and Beijing in 2022. The world has never seen a procession outside the confines of a stadium, until Friday’s night’s elaborate show along the Seine.

”It's Paris,”  local organizing committee president Tony Estanguet told TIME before the ceremony. “We will not offer them a stadium. We will offer them the city.” 

France has grand hopes for these Olympics, despite its recent contentious legislative elections and uncertainty about the government’s future. The country views sports as a vehicle for economic and social good. President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday addressed an international summit near the Louvre Museum; the French Development Agency promised to release $550 million—and a coalition of public development banks and other financial institutions pledged to invest $10 billion across the world—for community-based, inclusive and sustainable sports infrastructure by 2030. The Games have set Paris on a more eco-friendly path: hosting duties have accelerated a cleanup of the Seine, and sparked the need for cycling lanes to transport fans and residents to venues in the heart of the city, a worthy Olympic legacy. (Some of the boats transporting the athletes along the river even boasted their 100% electric engines).

The opening ceremony of an Olympics always offers promise: two weeks of rallying around athletic performance, the races in the pool, and somersaults off the vault stealing mindshare from the Israel-Gaza war, persistent bloodshed in Ukraine, and other global disruptions. But no sports event, even one that assembles more than 200 delegations like the Olympics, should be viewed through too peachy a lens. Inconvenienced locals deserve our ear: in a densely populated city like Paris, the usual grumbling from Olympic host city residents are bound to reach a fever pitch. Higher metro prices, station closures, special QR codes to access increasingly larger portions of the city that have been fenced off in the weeks and days leading to the Games, have all sparked outrage. More than 45,000 police and paramilitary officers, backed up by some 10,000 soldiers and 20,000 private security guards—not to mention all the snipers deployed on top of buildings along the river—helped keep the opening ceremony free of incident. But coordinated arson attacks on France’s high-speed rail system paralyzed transport routes in the hours before the Games: two German showjumpers missed the opening ceremony, a German news agency reported, after their train to Paris got stalled: they had to turn back in Belgium according to the Associated Press.

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But pageantry, especially rooted in centuries of tradition, tends to melt away scars—for a few hours, at least. The historic opening ceremony was the sole reason Kadi Kaliuste and Brad Ciccarelli from Toronto made the trip after successfully winning their tickets in a lottery in 2022. “If we had not gotten the opening ceremony tickets we would have dropped the whole idea [of coming to the Olympics],” says Kaliuste. 

At either end of the Pont au Change, one of several bridges straddling the Seine, spectators took advantage of unique vantage points from riverside buildings, including at the Tribunal de Commerce de Paris, and flung open windows and packed balconies for the best view of the festivities and the athletes parade on the water.

Thierry Olivier made the trip from Montpellier in the south of France to witness the historic opening ceremony with his sister Marie Thacle who lives in Paris.  “It is an honor to be an inhabitant of a country that is able to organize such a ceremony,” Olivier, who is retired, says. He’s also proud of Paris 2024 for being able to use existing facilities as much as possible. “It’s very positive,” he says. Thacle, also retired, endured the inconvenience of higher metro prices and rerouted traffic but, she says, “it’s necessary for just one time [for the Olympics].”

Rosa Maria Trevino traveled from Mexico City, alone, to the opening ceremony. “I decided I wanted to come, and wasn’t going to wait for anyone else to jump in,” says Trevino, a 39-year-old marketing executive for Heineken in Mexico, near the Pont Alexandre III bridge. “It’s pretty exciting to be a part of something different.” Mohammad Alhasan, high performance manager for Saudi Arabia’s track and field team, walked westward on the Seine in a green and white tracksuit. “I can’t wait to see the boats,” says Alhassan. “They're going to be on boats, right?” That was in fact the plan. Asked whether his three Saudi track Olympians are O.K. swimmers, if things go awry: “I think so.”

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For spectators along the Seine, the boat parade of athletes was a virtual experience for 25 minutes, as all they saw was an empty river while they watched the first boats—and Lady Gaga—on huge screens.  The variety of boats ferrying the athletes was a testament to the popularity of the Seine as a global attraction; athletes rode on everything from motorboats to dinner cruisers to boats with dance floors and, of course, the famous sightseeing bateaux mouches. There was even one with a hot tub.

Athletes from Greece, as per Olympic tradition, led the way on a vessel called the Don Juan II, while the small Cambodia boat looked in danger of capsizing in the current. Some delegations shared space on a vessel—Afghanistan, Germany, Albania, South Africa waved to more than 300,000 wet spectators in a neighborly manner.

There was intense hubbub along the Seine some three hours before the start, as six heavily-armed policemen sprinted down Avenue de la Motte-Picquet, which runs perpendicular to the Seine. Whether they were responding to an incident, or just warming up for the big event, was unclear. Sirens blared as thousands waited in a sidewalk line that seemed to stretch down to Nice. “It’s like a mile long,” said an exasperated spectator, sounding ready to give up. Security boats continued to buzz up and down the river in the hours before the opening ceremony started, and once spectators entered their specified, color coded zones for seats along the Seine, they weren’t allowed out — even to find an umbrella to protect themselves from the rain. One mom wearing American flag face paint on her cheeks was lucky enough to score a spot with an umbrella line. She said French organizers got “too aggressive with the logistics”—it took her, her husband, and her three kids (ages 13, 12 and 9), two-and-a-half hours to cross a bridge and go pass through a wave of security barriers to finally enter after the ceremonies started. Then a security official whisked her off the line and pushed her family out of the area—they were apparently in the wrong zone—-before she could even give her name.

The rain let up a bit towards the end of the night, as French soccer legend Zinedine Zidane took Olympic flame at the Tracedeiro, across from the Eiffel Tower, and hammed it up with athletes as he walked by them. Zidane then passed the torch to a surprise guest—Rafael Nadal—-the Spanish legend who won 14 French Opens. Nice touch by the French to respect a foreigner’s game. Nadal took the flame on a boat with Olympic legends Carl Lewis,Nadia Comanechi, and Serena Williams, and headed back east across the Seine, before stopping at the Louvre.

The French took it from there: host country athletes who passed the torch included tennis champ Amelie Mauresmo, four-time NBA champion Tony Parker,, swimming legend Alain Bernard, former pole vault world record holder Renaud Lavillenie and Charles Costes, France's oldest living 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 at the Jardin des Tuileries, adjacent to the Louvre.

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

Dion’s ballad capped off a night of pageantry dosed with some frustration. But in the end, Paris gave us an Olympic opener we’ll all remember. Paris pulled it off.