What We Know About the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony

Organizers of Friday’s opening ceremony for the Paris Olympics – the first time it will be held outside a stadium – have provided teasers for their spectacular plans but refused to give specifics.

Here is what we know about the concept, the artists and music based on public statements over the last few months and press leaks:

What’s the concept?  

Instead of using the main athletics stadium for the opening parade, as is customary, organizers have moved the event outside and into the heart of the capital – in keeping with their motto “Games Wide Open.”

Around 6,000-7,000 athletes are set to sail down a six-kilometer (four-mile) stretch of the river Seine from the Austerlitz bridge in the east to the Eiffel Tower, on 85 barges and boats.

Up to 500,000 people are set to watch in person from specially built stands, where tickets have sold for up to €2,700 ($2,900), on the river banks for free and from the overlooking balconies and apartments.

“Organizing a ceremony on the Seine is not easier than doing it in a stadium... but it has more punch,” chief organizer Tony Estanguet told AFP earlier this month.

Because of the size and complexity of the parade, it has never been rehearsed in full. 

What about the entertainment?

The show has been designed by prodigious theatre director Thomas Jolly, a 42-year-old known for hit rock-opera musical “Starmania.”

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He brought on board a creative team that includes the writer of French TV series “Call My Agent,” Fanny Herrero, as well as best-selling author Leila Slimani and renowned historian Patrick Boucheron. 

The show has been split into 12 different sections, with around 3,000 dancers, singers and entertainers positioned on both banks of the river, the bridges and nearby monuments.

A tribute to Notre-Dame cathedral, in the process of being renovated after a devastating fire in 2019, is guaranteed, possibly with dancers on its scaffolding.

Starting at 7:30 p.m. (1730 GMT), two-thirds of the ceremony will take place in daylight, then dusk – Jolly is hoping for one of Paris’s stunning summer sunsets – and will end with a light show.

The music will be a mix of classical, traditional ‘chanson francaise,’ as well as rap and electro.

Franco-Malian R&B star Aya Nakamura is widely tipped to perform despite criticism from far-right politicians, including Marine Le Pen who suggested an appearance by her would “humiliate” France.

French electro superstars Daft Punk said they had turned down an invitation to play, while globe-trotting French DJ David Guetta has been overlooked -- much to his irritation.  

What’s the message?

Asked to sum up his message last week, Jolly said it was “love.”

Despite the risk of irking conservatives, he said his work would be a celebration of cultural, linguistic, religious and sexual diversity in France and around the world.

“I think the people who want to live together in this diversity, this otherness, are much more numerous, but we make less noise,” he told AFP.

It is fair to assume it will be nothing like the widely panned retro-styled opening ceremony of last year’s rugby World Cup, which featured a succession of French cliches from baguettes to berets and the Eiffel Tower. 

Jolly’s team is also wary of over-emphasizing France’s historic contribution to the development of democracy and the concept of universal human rights thanks to its Enlightenment philosophers and 1789 Revolution.

“We wanted to avoid our natural tendency to lecture people,” Herrero told Le Monde newspaper recently.

And don’t expect a three-hour tribute to French greatness to rival the nationalistic pageantry seen at the Beijing Games in 2008.

“The opening ceremony in Beijing in 2008 was exactly what we did not want to do,” Boucheron told Le Monde. 

- What will be the big moments? -

With so much still under wraps, it’s hard to predict.

A performance by Aya Nakamura, after so much controversy about her role, would be a major moment so soon after parliamentary elections that saw the anti-immigration far-right gain a historic 143 seats in the national parliament.

Jolly has strongly hinted that a submersible or submarine could emerge from the waters of the Seine at some point.

“You have the sky, you have bridges, you have water, you have banks, you have so much space to make poetry,” Jolly told reporters last week. “So why not under the river also?” 

The biggest moment of all might simply be the end if everyone gets home safely.

The ceremony has given French police cold sweats ever since it was unveiled in 2021 because of the difficulty of securing so many people over such a vast urban area.