Follow our Olympics coverage from the Paris Games.
Victor Hugo, who as far as we know never covered an Olympic opening ceremony, had much to say about the city he adored and ultimately died in.
“He who contemplated the depth of Paris is seized with vertigo,” the famed French writer said. “Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic. Nothing is more sublime.”
Such was true of NBC and Peacock’s live coverage of the Paris opening ceremony on Friday afternoon. There was certainly a fantastic element to it simply because of the orgy of aesthetic beauty that is Paris. The ceremony featured a first-of-its-kind boat parade over a 3.7-mile route, crossing the heart of Paris, and passing through some of its most famed bridges and landmarks before concluding in front of the Trocadéro.
You want tragic, Victor? I give you the one day of the year that Paris most wanted to avoid rain. With the poor weather, we lost a lot on the visuals, unless you’ve always dreamed of rain ponchos and cameras with condensation.
Having Kelly Clarkson and Peyton Manning alongside Mike Tirico as the lead broadcasters made the event feel more like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade than previous opening ceremonies, and man did it feel a TV parade at times. To my ears, the hosts didn’t have much flow — that’s probably a result of never working together as a trio. (Clarkson and Manning sold the ceremony with the fervor of a WWE wrestler taking a diving armbreaker, which of course is part of the assignment.) As an old-school Olympics person, I missed being overwhelmed by factoids from each country. You either liked the format change of having the performances intersect with the Parade of Nations — or found it disjointed.
But there was plenty of sublime. Lady Gaga popping up on the banks of the Seine early on, singing in French and wearing something out of the Met Gala catalog, was magnifique. The can-can dancers performing on bridges across the Seine were awesome. The bells rang at Notre Dame, and we even got a headless Marie Antoinette. As the sun came down, we saw some lovely stuff with wide shots of the Seine. Having Maria Taylor on the Team USA boat produced some nice moments, including a rain-soaked and fun interview with LeBron James and Coco Gauff and Joel Embiid explaining that, “I look good in everything” when asked about his Olympic glasses. Celine Dion was epic.
(For those of you watching the prime-time version: NBC said viewers should expect that show to be about 75-80 percent similar to the live show that aired in the afternoon U.S. Eastern time. That was the case immediately as the first 30 minutes of the prime-time show featured an opening and some segments specific to prime-time and already had a tighter feel.)
Lady Gaga was among the many performers involved in Friday’s ceremony, which fought against the rain to try to capture the magic of Paris. (Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)
Tirico talked about a “party in the water” during the broadcast, but one thing that was lacking watching on a device (I viewed it via Peacock) was you could not really feel the crowd. That was the tradeoff not having the athletes walking into a packed mega-stadium.
The live coverage on NBC and Peacock featured a commercial-free hour beginning at 1:30 p.m. ET sponsored by six Team USA partners, the first time in Olympics history that the opening ceremony included commercial-free coverage. It was hard to miss the brand logos for each sponsor rotating in 10-minute increments, but this ain’t a non-profit enterprise, baby!
The host broadcaster for global events generally sells the soap hard for the host city — no one more than Fox Sports for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar — so give Tirico credit for mentioning early in the broadcast the high levels of E. coli bacteria in the Seine that make the historic river unsafe for swimming. But NBC punted on giving you much of anything of depth when it came to geopolitics outside of when we saw the Ukraine boat (and that was lovely and real). What is clear from the opening ceremony, and as The Athletic has previously covered, is that these Games will go very heavy on celebrity.
The event, as Tirico noted around 3:45 p.m. ET, was a production nightmare for the Olympic Broadcasting Services (the world feed) given the heavy rain. But Paris is still Paris, and when nighttime hit, the overhead shots were stunning. The torch-lighting ceremony had a unique touch, with legends Nadia Comaneci, Carl Lewis, Rafael Nadal and Serena Williams traveling back down the Seine together. That trek produced a laugh-out-loud hype job moment on the live broadcast when “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie said, “the rain has added magic” to the opening ceremony. Uh, no.
The show clocked in at a little over four hours (some of the elements lasted longer than the French Revolution),
including final thoughts from the broadcasters. Teddy Riner, a judoka, and track legend Marie-José Pérec, ended up lighting the torch, followed by a rousing song from Dion, her first public performance since 2020. (“She’s a vocal athlete,” an emotional Clarkson said poignantly of Dion in what was easily her best line of the night.)
The opening ceremony of the COVID-delayed Tokyo Summer Olympics averaged 17 million viewers across all of NBC’s platforms in 2021, the smallest audience for any opening ceremony in modern times. Will NBC get tragic or sublime viewership? We’ll know soon enough. But let’s root for no more rain heading forward.
GO DEEPER
A walk along the Seine for the Olympic opening ceremony, where the joy was back
(Top photo: Joel Marklund / PA Images via Getty Images)
