‘Paris Olympics opening will be daring, joyful’

The Paris Olympics’ opening ceremony next Friday will be a joyful, daring and atypical show in which artists and athletes together celebrate Paris, France and the Games alongside the river Seine, the ceremony’s organisers said.

Unlike for previous Olympics, the Paris 2024 opening ceremony will not take place in a stadium. Instead, dozens of boats will carry thousands of athletes and performers on a 6km route along the Seine.

“We know the importance of the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games. It’s key for the athletes, it’s key for the country which organizes it,” Tony Estanguet, the head of the Paris Olympics Organising Committee, told reporters.

“That’s why, from the start, we have been very ambitious because we really want this opening ceremony to embody all the ambition of Paris 2024: daring, atypical Games, which shows the best of France.”

Details including some of the artists taking part, who will last carry the torch and light the Olympic cauldron to mark the start of the Games, have been kept secret, and the ceremony’s artistic team said they had been rehearsing in private to keep it all under wraps.

But what is known is that there will be a floating parade, departing from Austerlitz bridge, sailing by Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral and arriving near the Eiffel Tower, with the show also using nearby monuments and mixing music, light and dance. “We’ll have some clichés (about France) but also we are going to share what is Paris, what is France today,” Thomas Jolly, the artistic director of the opening ceremony, told reporters.

More than 300,000 spectators will be watching from the riverbanks, with hundreds of millions more expected to watch on TV or on social media. “I’m very impatient ... I want to share it now because (we’ve been) working on this ceremony for two years ... and I’m so impatient to share it with the world,” Jolly said.

“About the artists (who will take part in the ceremony), we are not going to say anything but it will be a beautiful night with a lot of important people who have something to celebrate with us about Paris.” Jolly said the show would last about three and three-quarter hours and be “a large fresco” which will “interweave the parade of athletes, the artistic paintings and the elements of protocol which are staged.”

“That is the moment to celebrate the relationship that Paris, that France maintains with the world at the moment when the world enters Paris and when the world will look at Paris,” he said.

Maud Le Pladec, the ceremony’s choreographer, said: “There will be this total show, everything will be mixed.” “This is a popular show, but (you’ll see) how we can make it chic also, how we can make it à la Francaise.”

The Olympics will run from July 26 to Aug. 11, while the Paralympics will be held from Aug. 28 to Sept. 8.

Australian field hockey player Matt Dawson has gone to extraordinary lengths to compete at the Paris Olympics, amputating part of a finger to ensure he will be fit for his third Games.

The 30-year-old, a silver medallist at the Tokyo Games, was a doubt for Paris after recently breaking the ring finger on his right hand. Doctors gave him a choice of amputating part of his finger or letting it recover. Only one way would ensure he got to Paris.

“I didn’t have much time to make the decision,” he told Australian broadcaster Seven Network. “I made the decision then I called my wife and she said, ‘I don’t want you to make a rash decision’.

“But I guess I had all the information I needed to make a decision for not only playing in Paris, but for life after and giving myself the best health.”