In order to get the opening ceremony at Paris 2024 just right, organizers hired a playwright, a novelist and the woman who wrote Call My Agent!
It’s not enough that 45,000 people will be involved in running 160 barges down six kilometres of the Seine to the Eiffel Tower. They also have to tell a story.
Anyone who’s ever watched an OC knows that they all have stories and they are all incomprehensible. For a generation of Canadians, the only way you got that the terrifying inflatable head represented the power of the working class is because Brian Williams told you about it. And it still didn’t make any sense.
More than a billion people are expected to watch Friday’s ceremony, which starts at 7:30 p.m. in Paris. That will once again make it the most widely consumed piece of public art in the world. What is it about the OC that gets everyone from an emo teenager to a sports-agnostic great-grandparent so worked up?
Over the course of a few days, I’ve watched all the OCs – or, at least, as many of them as you can find online. From the lowest lows (Tokyo 2020) to the highest highs (London 2012), a few things occurred to me. If Paris had added a sportswriter to its literary brain trust, here’s what I’d be pitching in the story meeting.
Muhammad Ali carries the Olympic torch during the opening ceremony of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.Doug Mills/The Associated Press
The star of the show
Generally speaking, an OC will be remembered for a single person who was in attendance.
This can be good – an infirm Muhammad Ali tugging at hearts at Atlanta 1996. And it can be bad – I don’t even have to tell you which guy and which Olympics, do I? It rhymes with Merlin.
Queen Elizabeth opened two Olympics 36 years apart – Montreal 1976 and London 2012.
One thing you could say about the late Queen was that she got it. She was in on her own joke.
She did a buddy act with James Bond and (sort of) parachuted into the venue.
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip arrive for the opening ceremony of the 1976 Montreal Olympics.HAYES/The Canadian Press
Before agreeing to this comedic bit, the only thing the Queen reportedly demanded was to decide her own wardrobe. She wanted the pink of her dress to echo the one she’d worn in Montreal. See? That’s getting it.
When planning an OC, think hard about who this one person will be. They should be internationally recognized. Their historic significance should be beyond doubt (i.e. no 19-year-old pop stars). They ought to represent the most aspirational clichés about the host nation. They ought to be uniters, not dividers. And they should either go for pathos, or be willing to poke fun at themselves. Emotions to the fore.
Dancing
One disturbing and monolithic trend in OCs is the rise of dancing.
It first got serious airtime at Montreal 1976. In retrospect, that was the first modern OC, in the sense that it began foregrounding the razzmatazz and backgrounding the solemn rituals. It didn’t achieve that goal, but it was trying.
A lot of the dancing in Montreal was Tyrolean: feathered caps, dirndl skirts and spinning to accordion accompaniment. What this has to do with our culture I can’t say, but everyone else on Earth saw and it and said, “We need some of that Canadian swagger.”
Costumed dancers perform during the opening ceremony of the 2016 Rio Olympics.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
By the 21st century, all OCs must now feature a solid 20 minutes of mass choreography, featuring a cast of hundreds undulating to Euro beats, possibly while wearing matching body socks in primary colours. The atmosphere might generally be described as “Pack of feral Teletubbies discover their parents’ stash.”
This is a species of laziness. Dancing’s been done. Try something new. How about a short play? Or speed painting? At this point even Twyla Tharp would say, “Yoy, enough.”
Olympic mascot Misha-bear at the opening ceremony of the 1980 Moscow Olympics.AFP/Getty Images
Out-sporting the sports people
The OC of Moscow 1980 was remarkable for two feats of human engineering – Leonid Brezhnev’s buzzcut and thousands of acrobats slowly forming enormous Olympic rings.
Moscow’s OC was an act of artistic revenge. They were put out that no one cool had shown up, and wanted to make America jealous. So it really went for it at sports prom.
This in turn began the OC arms race. Los Angeles 1984 was the first of the big-ticket OCs that we’re now accustomed to.
The problem with having athletes perform at the Olympics is that the actual best in the world are right there, marching in after the show’s done. If Boris who was in Circle No. 3 was really that good, he wouldn’t be dancing in the pregame, would he?
Also, too much dancing. Pretty close to a solid hour of it. If I could stand that much dancing, I’d get the social-status bump from being a regular at the ballet.
Birds as a general proposition
An enormous flock of circling birds was the original CGI. As long as you don’t care all that much about where the birds go, or how it ends up for them, it can be impressive.
You run down a list of early 20th-century OCs and the birds really stand out. People in top hats and birds. Pigeons, mostly. They represent peace, which only people who have never lived in an apartment infested by them could believe.
They did London 1948 – the first postwar Olympics – on the cheap. A few speeches, a little marching and then the release of thousands of pigeons.
They carted the pigeons into the stadium in boxes, where they sat for several hours in stultifying heat. Once the boxes were opened, not all of those pigeons made it to freedom. A lot of brave pigeons died for sport on that day.
Unless you are prepared to vouch for their safety, skip the birds.
Quirk
Typically, OCs use the host country’s history as a narrative template.
Because Spaniards had spent most of the previous 60 years trying to blow each other up, that wasn’t the sort of uplifting material required. So at Barcelona 1992, they leaned into weird.
If you’re the sort of person who thinks OCs are too much, this is the one you’re thinking of. Animatronic tube men; people dressed up as cubist paintings; opera; pirate ships fighting undulating sword balls; blood; birds; more opera; mass outbreaks of flamenco.
What were they trying to say? I’m pretty sure they didn’t know. But the result is a beautiful incoherence that has aged well. It feels the most modern of any OC.
You already know where France is headed – a lot of Revolution, a little Enlightenment and something insufferable about fashion. Will Napoleon appear? Yes. Must he be dancing? Absolutely.
France has the history to carry this off, but most countries don’t. If you have no big idea you want to get across – and that’s okay – go weird.
A young athlete carries the Olympic torch on its final leg of the journey to light the cauldron at the opening ceremony of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.AFP/Getty Images
Lighting the cauldron
You know that guy who goes hog wild with the lighter fluid right before he explodes the barbecue? That’s every Olympic organizing committee.
Initially, a lone runner would circle the stadium, climb a stair and light the flame. Easy peasy. At Melbourne 1956, a teenage miler did the honours, very nearly lighting himself on fire in the process. Good fun.
A lone runner is iconic, but too simple for Olympic organizers, all of whom share an aesthetic vision with Liberace.
At Seoul 1988, they released a flock of pigeons as – yes, you guessed it – a gesture toward world peace. A couple dozen of them were hanging out on the lip of cauldron when it went up. They were incinerated on live television.
At Vancouver 2010, they built a Rube Goldberg machine of dancing pillars to delight the senses. Then it malfunctioned, as humongous, one-off, dancing pillars tend to do.
When you light the cauldron, do it the safe and easy way – have an archer launch a flaming arrow into it from a great distance.
The Olympic cauldron is lit at the opening ceremonies of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics.Peter Power/The Globe and Mail
It’s all about the timing
All OCs have a core logistical problem – the fun is preloaded.
There’s the show, then the march of athletes, then the speeches. It’d be like having a wedding where they open the bar for an hour, then everyone has to sit through a lot of blah blah while slowly sobering up.
This makes timing of the essence. Too little, and everyone feels ripped off. Too much, and you’re dragging through the final third.
As a general rule, the march plus the speeches takes 90 minutes. About an hour of arty historicism up front is best.
At Tokyo 2020, they fired their director a week before the ceremony and went short on the festive portion – 37 minutes. Terrible mistake. Worst opening ceremony in history. Dour and boring. Not one single bird.
Paris 2024 is gunning for three hours total. That’s ambitious, but I guess they have to factor in at least one barge taking on water.
Theatrics are usually accompanied by a hefty price tag
One OC is consistently mentioned as the best ever – Beijing 2008.
They didn’t do anything new. They just did everything bigger. A literal cast of thousands running around in sync for an hour inside a gobsmacking piece of architecture.
When people talk about that OC now they mention two things – how much it cost and the fireworks (and how much they cost).
Estimates vary. On the low end, US$100-million. On the high end, multiples of that.
That OC happened two months before the 2008 global financial collapse. That’s put every organizing committee since in a bind. Everybody wants bigger, but no one wants to hear how you blew the price of 30 new hospitals to get there.
Nobody has said how much the OC on the Seine will put France back, but a leaked memo suggested that moving it inland would run the price to €250-million. And that’s without the X factor of flotation. So I’m going to guess it cost a packet.
Seating structures are assembled along the banks of the Seine river in preparation for the Paris 2024 Olympic opening ceremonies.Siegfried Modola/The Globe and Mail
Listen, if you’ve got the cash, the OC is where you should spend it. Nobody cares how much trouble you took in building a state-of-the-art velodrome. Most people don’t know what a velodrome is.
But thanks to Strictly Come Dancing and the Super Bowl halftime show, the average global citizen does know something about production value. If you cheap out, it will be apparent.
Better you do the equestrian in a public park so that you can redirect some of that landscaping cash into a cast of thousands.
Also – and this might be the most important thing of all – do not skimp on fireworks.
The closest I could get to the last OC at Beijing 2022 was the window of my hotel room/COVID isolation unit. I was able to see the fireworks. It left me a little misty.
There’s something about a loud, bright bang at the grandest party on Earth to make you feel that, just for an instant, we are all part of one big, tumultuous family. Worry about the cheque once it comes.
Fireworks forming the Olympic rings illuminate the sky during the opening ceremonies of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.Li Xin/The Associated Press