Follow our Olympics coverage from the Paris Games.
PARIS — There was noise, the kind of noise that only a throng of humanity can sound.
How big a throng?
Four-miles-long-and-30-deep-on-both-sides-of-the-river big.
Hundreds of thousands lined the Seine, that river of rivers snaking through the French capital, on Friday night for the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics as thousands of athletes floated by on boats and barges, waving flags and arms and clinging to each other in ways that conjured that dark memory of a time when none of this was possible.
Pick whatever dystopian memory you like. Maybe it’s Naomi Osaka lighting the Olympic flame in Tokyo in the summer of 2021 in a cavernous Olympic stadium without any paying spectators because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Maybe it was seven months later, as Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, stood next to President Xi Jinping of China in another cavernous, mostly empty stadium at the start of the Winter Games in Beijing. Much of the world had moved on from the pandemic by then. China, where it all started, had not.
I was thinking of another memory, one from Paris in the late spring of 2021. I was here to cover the French Open tennis tournament. It was before France had actually reopened to the world.
On a weekend morning, I left my hotel near the western edge of the city for a run to the center of the city. I crossed the Pont au Double onto Île de la Cité and ran past the courtyard outside Notre Dame, one of the most famous cathedrals in the world. It’s about 800 meters from where I watched the river dance unfold Friday night.
That morning in 2021, it was empty.
I headed back onto the right bank and turned west, then ran into the plaza in front of the Louvre and the Jardin des Tuileries. Alone again.
This was late May, the height of what was normally tourist season. How could this be? What I would have given back then for a night like Friday in the City of Light, for Paris to be Paris, and for all sports, especially the Olympics, which, in the most idealized, hokey sense, is supposed to be a universal celebration of humanity coming together through sport, to be the Games that we’d always known them to be, and that we knew they probably wouldn’t be for a while.
So when all of that misery began to fade, as the scientists told us eventually it would, it fell to Paris to do something big.
The IOC didn’t want Paris merely to host the Games. It wanted Paris to relaunch them. And there was no better way to do that than with the opening ceremony, long a mix of high and low culture, of interpretive dance and fireworks inside big concrete boxes. The whole routine had become a bit played out and predictable, even with all the stunts and hijinks.
The guy cycling around the upper reaches of the Birds Nest in Beijing on a rope; James Bond parachuting into London’s Olympic Stadium with a Queen Elizabeth impersonator. Every couple years, another five-hour mix of celebration and hot mess. Also, only roughly 80,000 people would get to watch in person, many of them from the bland world of officialdom, serving as a proxy for everyone else in the host city.
That all feels very 2016 now. After Friday night, it might always feel that way.
Paris, a city that prides itself on delivering the highest culture to the rest of the world, had another idea for a post-Covid world filled with social animals who have learned to not take human connection for granted again. This is how we ended up with 300,000 people along the banks of the Seine and thousands of athletes waving to them from boats instead of marching in formation into a locked-down stadium — and hundreds of performers doing everything from the can-can to singing opera with heavy metal instrumentals along the riverbanks.
None of this happens easily or without some pain and consequences. Paris has a sizable homeless population that congregates near the Seine. Authorities moved them. They likely didn’t get much say in the matter.
Fencing stretched for miles along the river, with access limited for weeks. Residents of the streets near the Seine needed a special QR code to get home. That’s no fun. Police and military personnel made the area feel like a combat zone. For every Parisian joyous about this celebration there is some incalculable number who are cranky about — or worried about — their safety. The arson on the rail line outside the city Friday morning did not help matters.
At the core of the Olympic idea though, is the belief, however hopeless and silly it can feel at times, that if people from all over the world can gather and compete peacefully with each other every two years, then there will be less strife. That doesn’t mean that the Games aren’t filled with commercialism aimed at maximizing profits and sharing little of the riches with the athlete. That, too, is true.
But alongside that is this thing that unfolded Friday evening in the City of Light, with tourists from Brazil and Poland and Switzerland and Ghana and Germany jammed together.
There was Zamir Thahir, 6, and his sister, Zaara, 5, stretching on their tippy-toes to get a glimpse of the boars floating by.
They are Sri Lankan by descent, British by birth, in Paris for the weekend to watch the ceremony, badminton and beach volleyball.
“I know every country here,” said Zamir, who spent the afternoon making British flag signs.
OK, not every country, he said, “but 195.”
Zaara was asked if she would always remember this night. Her eyes widened, her head nodded. Then she went back to holding up those handmade flags and the big real one from Sri Lanka.
Around 8 p.m. the skies began to open, light drizzle at first, then the steady big drops. Barely anyone moved as Egypt and Ecuador and Eritrea floated by.
And so it went, for hour after hour, rain pelting the athletes of Finland and Gabon and Gambia and the guy on the piano on Île Saint-Louis. The weather did little to stop the arm-waving or the music, or the chanting for Mexico and Guyana and Haiti. Everyone got a good soaking. The party went on, as it will for the next 16 days.
As the rain fell, Zamir and Zaara’s father, Zam Thahir, turned to them and said, “You’re going to get sick, but it’s worth it — because you won’t forget this.”
The Games are open, after opening as they never had before.
(Top photo of fans cheering along the Seine during Friday’s opening ceremony: Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)
