Au revoir les jeux! As ever it just sounds a little better in French. And frankly, everything has looked softer and more joyful seen through the lens of the Paris 2024 Olympics over the past 19 days. The last of which came to a formal end in Saint Denis with a closing ceremony that was genuinely uplifting in its echoes of the Summer Games that preceded it.
It was fitting the final note in Paris should be another show of colour. These have been the most beautiful and cloudless of Games. Olympic lore dictates that closing ceremonies will always end up feeling like an overblown imposition. This time around you just got the feeling everyone present wanted a chance to say goodbye.
The ceremony is, of course, also the start of something, the ritual of the never-ending cycle, passing the flame to Los Angeles 2028, which was represented here by a hand of US political and celebrity might, and indeed by 62-year-old Tom Cruise jumping off a roof on a wire, which was presumably non‑negotiable, Tom was very clear on that.
For Paris this has by now become a quietly gleeful hospital pass, Follow that. These have been the most vivid and visceral of Games, fully embedded in the city, and staged around structures and vistas that are in their own right a kind of emotional sucker punch. Yeah. Just the Pont Alexandre III there covered with bleeding and spent triathletes. No, really. I’m fine. Just hayfever.
These qualities have now entered into the emotional register of the summer Games. LA 2028 will be required to be at least a little bit beautiful and seductive and alluring. Paint me like one of your French Olympics.
The closing ceremony had the feel of a victory lap from the start. It was still 30C inside the Stade de France at kick-off time, but nobody really seemed to mind. The Stadium has been a success, barely tarted up but enough to provide a really boisterous show. As it was on Sunday night, packed with 71,500 people around a stage of generic angular plinths over a starry black carpet.
The 48-page closing ceremony media guide was, as ever, full of mind-boggling figures. Nine thousand athletes present. Nine thousand ceremony workers. One thousand projectors. Five hundred unicycles made of ham. Justin Timberlake performing Joe le Taxi while rolling around the athletics track inside a giant Camembert cheese wheel.
In reality, the performers in the French section were pretty great. The introductory outdoor number from Zaho de Sagazan in the Tuileries gardens was stunning. At one point Léon Marchand wandered into shot in a suit and everyone just melted. In the stadium Emmanuel Macron and Thomas Bach also appeared in their box, hugging and looking grave (the Games is theatre: give it theatre).
It already feels like a lifetime ago that people were being offended by Thomas Jolly’s very Parisian ceremony. Pantomime, punk, cocking a snook, blue men, caricature. Meet: France. Jolly was back here, albeit this was a more formal affair. The athletes performed the usual hugely wholesome and heartwarming procession. Team GB’s flag bearers were Alex Yee, the men’s triathlon champion, and Bryony Page, who went through so many ups and downs en route to trampolining gold.
It did drag at moments. There was a very long minor chord ominous expressive dance number. There was a chaotic moment as all the athletes ran on stage and had to be told to get off before they ruined it. A band called Phoenix played some grumpy French pub rock. A French Cambodian rapper was pretty amazing.
Finally, Bach appeared on stage, along with the Paris committee chairmen, Tony Estanguet, who gave an excellent speech full of unfeigned pleasure and gratitude. At one point he even talked about having the “most proposals” at an Olympic Games. Oh get off. You.
“France recovered itself. We became one party,” he said, during the message of unity part. Hmm about that. The real world will of course now re-enter this picture and the real world is a chaotic place. At times during these Games Macron has resembled the character in a disaster movie who looks around and says, hey, I think we got away with it, just as the real tsunami rises behind him and fills the horizon.
Bach was reassuringly super-dull. He said the city of light had never shined so bright, in the voice of a man being forced to study a series of actuary documents for 48 hours straight. Then finally we got the handover, first the Olympic flag to the Mayor of Los Angeles, then some anthem stuff. Then finally, as hotly trailed, actual Tom Cruise appeared standing on the lip of the stadium roof, before jumping to his tragic and bloody death.
Not really. Cruise was instead lowered on a wire. Much had been made beforehand of his planned “death defying stunt” which slightly lost its edge when it emerged parts of it had been pre-recorded and he is patently walking around not actually dead at all. So … slight Buzz kill.
People grabbed and kissed him. He didn’t go away. Instead he ran on stage and grabbed the Olympic flag like he was reconquering the Pacific islands, ran off with it, got on a motorbike, fleeing to, and not from, the sounds of Red Hot Chili Peppers, which is much braver. The tableau at the end with the Hollywood sign and Olympic rings was very cool. That’s the image. That’s what we’re going to get.
So, eventually, at the Stade we got to the flame and its passage. As metaphors go the flame is a bit like the fabled village cooking pot, the one that’s never emptied, which we just keep on replenishing, chucking more on top, and somewhere at the bottom are molecules of the original recipe from all those years ago.
Baron de Coubertin’s jawbone is in there. One of Fanny Blankers-Koen’s hair grips. Amateurism, cinder tracks, a bouquet garni of neo-classical 1930s fascism. And now this new entity is being punted on top, Los Angeles 2028.
LA 2028 will be very different. “We do not have the Eiffel Tower, but we are the world capital of entertainment,” was the verdict of Michael Johnson, who obviously hasn’t seen Civil War. But LA will play to its strengths: Hollywood, the tech giants, its own legend.
The head of the LA28 committee is called Casey Wasserman, which is already a decent start. American sports administrators should be called things like Buck Flipburger and Remington Blazer-Epaulette III. The talk this week has included reusing existing infrastructure and the move to make LA 2028 “car‑free” (good luck with that).
This is another aspect of Paris 2024, a Games that covered its costs, that doesn’t reek of overspend and pointless legacy projects. This is the gift of Paris 2024 to that schlocky old travelling flame, the hands across the hurdles stuff that still lurks behind all this; and which was present, for all the politics at one remove, in the joy and spectacle of Paris en fete.
• This article was amended on 12 August 2024 because Zaho de Sagazan performed the ceremony’s opening act in the Tuileries gardens, not at Versailles as an earlier version said.
