I’m not a sports fan. Baseball gives me flashbacks to the parade of humiliations that was my Little League career. The constant squeaking sound of sneakers against the floor in basketball games drives me insane. I used to think I liked to watch college football, but in fact I just liked eating fried food with my friends on fall Saturdays. I can do that without the head trauma component. Soccer? Too snoozy. Hockey? Too icy. Golf? Please no.
But I do love the Olympics. The games certainly share many traits that turn me off to professional sports. The massive civic expenditures the host cities have to endure certainly resonates badly with me, a citizen of a city and state that are currently spending hundreds of millions of dollars renovating sports stadiums while we lack a functioning mass transit system. Paris’ leaders seem to have handled that conundrum better than most cities. Many of the stadia and venues are temporary; the only permanent new construction is an aquatics center. In the opening weekend, this fact has made for some spectacular television, like beach volleyball matches played in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. The equestrian events take place on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles.
The opening ceremonies featured a memorable reference to one of Versailles’ former residents. I’m not sure what kind of opening ceremony I was expecting from the French, but a bloody Marie Antoinette holding her own head while singing a song from the French Revolution with the Gallic metal band Gojira playing on balconies over the Seine was not it. The opening ceremonies are always a mixed bag, at best. The producers have the daunting task of bringing everyone together while making everything seem monumental, and something’s got to give. Paris’ opening ceremonies may just have been the best ever. There was fire, parkour, fashion, art, and a Dionysian bacchanal in the streets of Paris. Instead of marching into the stadium en masse, the teams paraded down the Seine in a flotilla of boats. The only thing that didn’t go according to plan was the rain, which drenched hundreds of dancers along the riverbanks and chased away the crowd. But the driving rain also produced some indelible images, like a regal LeBron James holding the flag aloft at the bow of the American boat like George Washington crossing the Delaware River.
It was a rainy weekend in Memphis, so I was locked on the couch cramming as many events into my eyeballs as possible. For me, the weirder the sport, the better. I eschewed gymnastics prelims on the opening weekend in favor of rugby sevens. The French men’s team pulled off the upset of the games so far when they won gold in front of a hometown crowd, surviving a squad of swarming Fijians, who had, until Saturday, never lost a game in Olympic history.
For a professional appreciator of the moving image like myself, the Olympics are a quadrennial update on the state of the photographic arts. The modern games excel at producing beautiful images; the photo editor for The Atlantic reportedly sorted through 25,000 wire photos on Friday. This year, the best television has come not from Paris, but from 9,700 miles away in Tahiti. The surfing competition is being held there on a beach known as Teahupo’o, which translates to “wall of skulls.” With competitors riding 50-foot waves breaking onto a razor-sharp coral reef, it may be the most dangerous event in Olympic history, but it’s super relaxing to watch.
The camaraderie of the surfers having the rides of their lives while incidentally also competing for gold is the best example of the Olympic spirit. Gathering all of humanity together to see who can run the fastest and jump the highest may seem quaint in our troubled world. But three wars raging across the globe makes the traditional Olympic truce seem like a pretty good idea. The most moving example of peak human performance came from Celine Dion. After being sidelined from the stage for four years due to a rare neurological condition, she closed out the opening ceremony by slaying at a planetary level with Edith Piaf’s “Hymne a l’Amour.” As her fellow NBC broadcasters sat dumfounded, Kelly Clarkson, herself an accomplished singer, struggled through tears to find words for what we had witnessed. It was the most authentic emotion I’ve seen on TV in a long, long time.
Watch the 2024 Paris Olympics on NBC or Peacock.
