Key events
The Greek barge has departed to begin the procession of athletes. Greece always goes first due to the origins of the Olympic Games. There are water cannon and fireworks going off, someone playing an accordion while wearing angel wings sitting on the edge of a bridge, and I am not going to lie, there is *A LOT* all going on at once here. The IOC refugee team departs second.
The ceremony now shows IOC president Thomas Bach and France’s president Emmanuel Macron greeting each other at the Trocadéro, where the formalities will take place late. The Pont d’Austerlitz has been engulfed in the colours of the Tricolour.
With some irony, given the huge transport disruption in Paris today, the opening sequence sees Zinedane Zidane stuck on a Metro train with the power cut out, and a group of youths have come to the rescue, taking the Olympic flame from the train, through the Paris catacombs, to the underground waterways of France’s capital city.
Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony begins
The Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony has begun with a video interlude showing people delivering the Olympic flame to an empty Stade de France, only to realise that the ceremony is at the River Seine. Footbal legend and World Cup winner Zinedine Zidane is being shown hurtling the flame to the correct location.
Franco-Malian singer Aya Nakamura, the most listened to French-speaking singer in the world is confirmed to be performing at some point in the ceremony. If you want a flavour of what she sounds like, Nakamura put out a new single, 42, last month, although it remains to be seen whether she will go down the George Michael 2012 closing ceremony route of “Here’s my new single …”
In April, after rumours that she would appear had drawn ire from far-right politicians including Marine Le Pen and Gérard Larcher, Nakamura thanked fans for their support.
By the way, if you are up for signing up for newsletters, it would be remiss of me not to mention our Paris 2024 daily briefing. Running throughout the Olympics and Paralympics it will be a guide to the day’s highlights and the best that is yet to come. Sign up for free here.
You can also find our complete schedule for the Games here.
Pssst. It isn’t all boats and fashion and fireworks. There is actually going to be a lot of sport over the next fortnight too. Elsie Grover-Jones has this explainer on something I’m not entirely sure I’d ever thought about before. She asks What will make the Paris 2024 Olympic swimming pool fast or slow?
The swimming gets under way tomorrow, with four gold medals on offer by the end of the day.
One of the features of Olympic opening ceremonies is the fashion focus on the uniforms that competitors have been given to wear. Team USA have raised some eyebrows by pairing what looks like a very traditional red and white edged blue jacket with a blue-striped shirt and … jeans?
There are 85 boats due on the water today, and 30 of them will be electric boats. The River Seine was the location of the testing of the first ever electric boat, in 1881 by a Parisian inventor named Gustave Trouvé.
The Team GB flag-bearers tonight are diver Tom Daley and rower Helen Glover. They spoke to the BBC.
Daley said he felt “honoured”, telling viewers in the UK:
I remember walking out in 2008, behind Mark Foster, and thinking about how cool that was just to be part of a ceremony like that. Now to be going into a fifth Games and being able to start off in this fashion, it’s pretty, pretty special.
I mean, in our team meeting just before we came here, performance director said, you know, being an Olympic champion is a very elite group, but then to become flagbearers as well is an even smaller group. So I feel very honoured, and it’s going to be a special evening.
Glover said similar:
It is a real honour, because we have an incredible Team GB, and they are going to do some of the most amazing performances in the next two weeks. So to be leading them out to start the Games together. It is a real honour.
Each week our Saturday edition newsletter has a message from our editor-in chief Katharine Viner, and in tomorrow’s newsletter she sets out some of the challenges facing Paris 2024, and the Guardian’s reporting on them:
The run up to the Paris Games was dominated by political upheaval in the host nation, where a surging far-right was deflected at the last moment in snap parliamentary elections. Paris correspondent Angelique Chrisafis wrote about hopes across France that the greatest sporting show on Earth can help unite a fractured nation. With luck it can bring some unity to a fractured planet, too. As sports writer Andy Bull put it: this is a Games that has been reframed by the shadow of conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East.
There certainly wasn’t a great deal of fraternité in the last few days before the Games kicked off. This morning, France’s rail system was left in chaos after a massive coordinated attack on the TGV network. Before that, there was a Russian spy scandal, with a 40-year-old chef arrested on suspicion of plotting with a foreign power to stage “large scale” acts of “destabilisation” during the Games. There was a sporting spy scandal, too, with defending women’s football champions Canada caught using drones to spy on their opponents. Then there was chaos in the men’s tournament during a Morocco v Argentina match that managed to include a pitch invasion, the fallout from a racism scandal and even a two-hour wait for a VAR decision. And Charlotte Dujardin – a British multiple medal winner – was forced to pull out of the equestrian event after a distressing video of her repeatedly whipping a horse emerged on Tuesday.
Elsewhere, the Guardian went on location with the Refugee Team in training and profiled boxer Cindy Ngamba, the team’s flagbearer. Simon Hattenstone interviewed GB cycling great Victoria Pendleton who spoke about being crushed by the pressure of the sport that made her name. We also met surfer Sam Sills, who lived in a van on his way to Olympic recognition; gymnast Becky Downie who exposed abuse in her sport; the 2012 gold medal winner Etienne Stott who is now a climate activist and spent time with the Ukrainian swimming team in training as the bombs fell.
You can sign up for the Guardian Saturday Edition newsletter here.
Which order will countries appear in the Olympic opening ceremony parade?
Well, that is a very good question. One of the joys/terrors of covering an Olympic opening ceremony live is that everybody is very tight-lipped about it in advance. There are certain protocols – but protocols are there to be upended.
What we expect is that Greece will lead the athletes parade as is tradition, paying respect to the origins of the Olympic Games. It has then become usual for those in the IOC Refugee Olympic team to go second.
France will come last, as hosts. We expect the two teams in front of them to be Australia (as hosts in 2032) and the US (as hosts in 2028).
The rest of the countries and territories are then sandwiched in between those, in alphabetic order in French. Germany, for example, will be in with the ‘A’ boats as Allemagne, rather than ‘G’ for Germany or indeed ‘D’ for Deutschland.
There is a caveat though. It has been suggested that the smaller delegations might share boats, so some places that are only sending one or two competitors, like Andorra, Belize, the Cook Islands, Liechtenstein, Mauritania, Nauru, Somalia and Tuvalu, might become wild cards.
The route goes from Pont d’Austerlitz in the east of Paris to the Pont d’léna, in the west, between the Eiffel Tower and Trocadéro Esplanade.
Welcome to the Paris Olympic Games 2024 opening ceremony
Bonjour! Salut! Bienvenue! Hello! Γειά σου! Welcome to our live coverage of the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games 2024!
Opening ceremonies don’t make or break a Games as being considered a success, but can certainly set the tone, and often are the moment a host nation gets the Olympic spirit and gets behind hosting the Games.
Paris 2024 is promising a unique spectacle, as the for the first time the ceremony is a parade through the city, on a 6km route on the River Seine, rather than being stadium-bound.
It was an imaginative part of the city’s bid to host the Games, but has also become fraught with complexity, with residents complaining about large parts of the city being sealed off during the preparations, and security concerns meaning the promise of large crowds thronging the banks of the river have been scaled down.
Nevertheless, with the world’s eys on it, we are expecting a great show. We will bring you the best pictures, analysis and reaction as it all unfolds from 7pm BST tonight. My colleague David Hills has five things to look out for …
