The Paris 2024 Olympics games opening ceremony, will be held in the middle of a city instead of inside a stadium, as the organizing committee unveiled their plans on Monday.
The Paris 2024 Olympics games committee had said this as they unveiled their planned opening ceremony which will be at the Seine, after nearly two years of work.
Paris 2024 Olympics Games Committee for the next Summer Games, said it planned to send more than 10,000 Olympians down the Seine in a parade of some 160 boats instead of having a traditional march into the Olympic Stadium. The journey would end at the Eiffel Tower, and the celebration would occur in a plaza across the river from the landmark.
“We wanted to imagine a new way and a new model,” Tony Estanguet, the three-time Olympic gold medalist in canoe slalom who leads the Paris organizing effort, said in an interview ahead of the announcement.
“For France, it was so important for the future of the Games to have this model.”
The announcement is coming less than two months before Olympic organizers in China will hold an opening ceremony closed to foreign visitors, appeared to be an effort to signal bright prospects for the Games after the coronavirus pandemic disrupted the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics and the 2022 Winter Olympics, which open Feb. 4 in Beijing, with the Paralympics to follow on March 4.
But the timing also highlighted France’s efforts to have it both ways on the Beijing Games: with Paris 2024 organizers (and the International Olympic Committee) pledging a rosy future at the same time France’s government, like the I.O.C., has resisted calls to criticize China over human rights concerns.
“The objective is to bring different things, remarks Michaël Aloisio, chief of staff of Paris 2024. It is difficult to reinvent oneself but this is what Tony Estanguet asks us (note: president of the OCOG). ” There were new disciplines (especially breakdance), the unique Olympic Games-Paralympic Games emblem, participatory events (the marathon, while waiting for the cycling event?). There will now be the gigantism of this ceremony.
Because France is used to new ceremonies with the renewal of the genre during the Albertville Olympics and the sumptuous show imagined by Philippe Decouflé.
“When we imagine an organization in France, we do not expect a classic organization, continues Aloisio. You should know that 1 billion people are looking at us. Never so many people will look at France.”