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Paris Olympics will be the first time an opening ceremony will be held outside a stadium. What more do we know about the big event? read more
 "What to expect from the Paris Olympics 2024 opening ceremony")
Paris Olympics opening ceremony will be the first to not be held inside a stadium. AP File Photo
The opening ceremony for the Paris Olympics, scheduled for July 26, is going to be unlike any that the Summer Games have seen before. It will be the first time an opening ceremony will be held outside a stadium. With few days to go to the big event, things have been largely kept under wraps with very few specifics.
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What is the venue for the Paris Olympics opening ceremony?
Instead of using the main athletics stadium for the opening parade, as is customary, organisers have moved the event outside, into the heart of the French capital – in keeping with their motto “Games Wide Open”.
Around 10,000 athletes on 100 boats are set to sail down a six-kilometre stretch of the river Seine from the Austerlitz bridge in the east to the Eiffel Tower, on 85 barges and boats. They will get to sail past Paris’ iconic landmarks, including Notre Dame cathedral and Pont Neuf.
The boats will not only transport the athletes during the parade but also be used in the artistic part of the ceremony, which will showcase the history and culture of the city and France.
Is the opening ceremony free?
With up to 500,000 people expected to watch in person from specially built stands, where tickets have sold for up to 2,700 euros ($2,900), on the river banks for free and from the overlooking balconies and apartments.
“Organising a ceremony on the Seine is not easier than doing it in a stadium… but it has more punch,” chief organiser Tony Estanguet told news agency AFP.
Because of the size and complexity of the parade, it has never been rehearsed in full.
Who will perform at the opening ceremony?
The identity of the performers has been kept a tight secret. The show has been designed by prodigious theatre director Thomas Jolly, a 42-year-old known for hit rock-opera musical “Starmania”.
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 broken down 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.
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 had turned down an invitation to play, while globe-trotting French DJ David Guetta has been overlooked.
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.
Jolly’s team are wary of over-emphasising France’s historic contribution to the development of democracy and the concept of universal human rights.
“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.
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?”
What time does the opening ceremony begin?
The opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics begins at 7:30pm local time (1730 GMT/11pm IST), which means two thirds of the ceremony will take place in daylight, then dusk. It will end with a light show.
The ceremony is expected to last just under four hours with expectations of Paris’ iconic sunset in the background.
The ceremony has given French police cold sweats ever since it was unveiled in 2021. The urban area includes a hospital and ensuring seamless movement amid VVIP activity will not be easy. Around 45,000 members of the security forces are slated to be on duty.
What is the order of the parade?
As is tradition, Greece will be the first nation to enter the parade ceremony.
NBA star and French basketball player Giannis Antetokounmpo is one of the flagbearers for the Games.
Greece will be followed by the Refugee Olympic Team, with hosts France going last.
Meanwhile, athletes from Russia and Belarus - competing as individuals because of their countries’ role in the war in Ukraine - will not take part.
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