An Urbanist Review of The Olympic Opening Ceremony

Not that anyone asked... but I have some thoughts!

Last week I wrote about how cities and sports go hand in hand, one provides the stage, and the other the spectacle. I also mentioned how excited I was for the Paris Olympics. Freeing the opening ceremony from the confines of a stadium was a risky choice. Paris, the backdrop of revolutions, World Fairs, countless parades and celebrations, and home to arguably the most famous street life in the world would be the site of the ceremonies. The basic premise: Boats carrying athletes paraded down the Seine River intercut by various performances and bits of Olympian ceremony. Did it sufficiently use the city to maximize the spectacle? My answer is… almost. The city’s iconic places were woven into the ceremony, sometimes breathtakingly so. But the city’s famous street life, its cafes, stylish crowds, and pleasant human buzz were absent barring a few comically cliche references in dance numbers. Before I explain how these could and should have made a stronger appearance, let’s go through some of the good and the pretty good.

The good

Windows! They don’t exist in stadiums, and people hanging out of windows is the hallmark of a good parade. It was beautiful to see Parisians crowding onto balconies and draping flags out of windows. It was also nice to see one of the most obvious features of the urban environment utilized by the organizers to frame various performers. This was one aspect of the city’s street life that did make it to the show.

The entire Tuileries cauldron lighting: By this point in the ceremony, I’m four hours in and ready to be done. The organizers kept the location of the Olympic cauldron a secret, so when a torch-bearing Zidane finally approached the Eiffel Tower I expected him to shoot to the top and ignite the tower’s tip in flame. But no, they turn the torch around and put it back on the river for another boat ride intercut by an endless montage of Olympic moments. The payoff was the best choreographed moment of the show. Tony Parker ran the torch through an empty Louve courtyard - a place most visitors have probably stood - before passing it to a growing crew of French athletes. Night had fallen and the statues and hedges of the Tuileries gardens were barely visible. NBC’s Kelly Clarkson and Peyton Manning had finally stopped talking. It was a moment of tranquility that reached a crescendo when the athletes processed down the garden path and the camera panned to a giant hot-air balloon, the receiving vessel for the torch. The balloon detached and lifted the flaming cauldron over the gardens, steaming and smoking in the pouring rain. My central criticism of the ceremony is its lack of vibrance, but this was a moment when dramatic emptiness was used to great effect, and the location perfectly met the moment.

Eiffel Tower…Good: There isn’t much to say about this. Paris’ iconic structure looked incredible, especially lit up at night. Celine Dion’s performance at its base will probably be most people’s enduring memory.

The Pretty Good But Could Have Been Better

Boats. The organizers decided to use the actual riverboats which carry thousands of tours each year down the Seine. I liked that these everyday bits of Parisian life were repurposed for the occasion. I was partial to this classy number from Bhutan.

On the other hand, most of the boats were a bit… plain. It was a missed opportunity to not at least decorate the things with flags and colors. Initially, I had imagined something more like barges or floats designed specifically for this purpose. What if Team Great Britain pulled up in the Royal Barge?

The Greeks could have had a Trimine, New Zealand could have been paddled out in Maori canoes. If you’re going to have a ceremony that trades shamelessly in national cliches you might as well go all out.

Dancing in the street (and on the roof). Beijing set the bar for big choreographed dance numbers, followed by London and its Danny Boyle-directed romp through British History. I figured the country that invented Les Mis would probably be pretty good at this. I’ll stick to my urbanist wheelhouse and not comment on the content of the dances themselves (I could have done without the Louis Vuitton one), but I felt they could have more creatively used the cityscape in places. I’m not sure why Lady Gaga had to perform on an anonymous patch of the Seine quay on what was essentially a gold box in front of a blank stone wall, and I laughed when the camera zoomed out to reveal she was performing to literally no one.

I could have also done without 50% of the bridge performances. They weren’t bad, but they took up space that could have been given over to viewers (More on this later). Things got better when we moved off the street. The lone dancer on a tower overlooking the Seine was nice - and I felt a vague sense of relief when the Assasians Creed torch guy didn’t slip on the wet metal as he ran across the rooftops. Notre Dame, clad in scaffolding after a catastrophic fire, was creatively used as the site of a death-defying, pre-recorded dance number.

What was missing: People.

An opening ceremony in the most famous city in the world and it looked… kind of empty? Let’s get two things out of the way. Many of the decisions about the lack of people were driven by security concerns. A city is vastly more complicated to secure than an enclosed stadium, and coordinating a show there amidst a procession of dignitaries, heads of state, and athletes was a nightmare. The morning headlines were dominated by a coordinated arson attack against the French highspeed rail system which left thousands of travelers in the lurch hours before the event was meant to kick off. The number of public viewing areas had already been scaled back because of security concerns, and Parisians have been complaining about the warren of fences and barricades along the Seine for the past week. The second thing is that it rained. I’m not sure why no one planned for this and more of the viewing areas weren’t covered, but it obviously contributed to people not spending more time watching. Still, I was sort of shocked at how few people got to watch what the organizers called “the most open Olympic games ever.” Let’s pretend that security is solvable, here is what I would have done differently if we applied some placemaking principles.

Start it farther up the river.

The parade started at the Pont D’ Austerlitz. When the bridge exploded in red, white, and blue fireworks at the start of the parade I thought ‘This is going to be good.’

But then the Greek boat (Greece always goes first) emerged from under the bridge into a vast expanse of empty, grey water. In a stadium, the crowd roars to meet the arriving athletes, but here the athletes appeared on the broadcast like tiny specks in the distance waving to no one. The organizers forgot about one of the key principles of placemaking (and something I wrote about before) narrowness creates vibrance. The river is wide by Pont D’ Austerlitz, it was impossible to capture the boat and any spectators on the shore in one frame let alone have the crowd or athletes call to one another. The whole thing felt limp. I would have started the ceremony right at Île de la Cité, the island in the middle of the Seine, where the river is significantly narrower. The Islands tree-lined tip is a popular sitting place most of the year and it would have been possible to have crowds on both sides of the arriving boats.

Open the Seine Quay.

The Seine is the poster child for placemaking on an urban river. Until 2013, most of the quay was an auto road, but it’s been completely pedestrianized and Parisians and visitors alike treat it like one long living room.

Some portions of the route were open to viewers.

But many normally accessible places were not. By the time the torch was speeding along the river, the only people on the quays were police with automatic weapons. Again, I’m sure the lack of quay-side seating was a security limitation, but it was strange that the Seine appeared to be LESS vibrant and full of people than on a typical summer day.

Creative seating

This is silly… but one easy way to inject a little more of Paris’ street life into the ceremony would have been to use some cafe seating! The city is famous for its street-facing cafe terraces. Line a row of rattan bistro chairs up on the upper quay, slap a table in between them, and you could probably charge $4000 a pop.

Bridges should be for people.

The promotional renderings of the parade showed bridges packed with people.

In the end, it looks like only the Pont Royal and the Pont Du Carrousel got this treatment, and when boats passed under it was a rare moment that brought athletes close to the city crowd. An NYT reporter commentating from this area said that fans went absolutely wild when the boat carrying the French athletes passed underneath. Anyone who has ever been a tourist on a riverboat under a bridge has probably waved up to the people on it. Performances could have easily been moved to the quais to make room for more of this type of moment.

Involve the artisans and craftspeople in the show — as people not just symbols.

Besides a heavily branded dance about Louis Vuitton luggage and one person dressed like a croissant, we got very little about the bakers, leatherworkers, painters, seamstresses, and chefs that make Paris famous. It would be one thing if the organizers decided they wanted to pivot from stereotypes… but again, they dressed a woman as a croissant and had a guy playing accordion in a beret. The London opening ceremony included real members of various groups and even subcultures — Chelsea Pensioners, Pearly Kings and Queens, and NHS nurses doctors, and staff. Why not have a parade of actual patissiers? Why not have actual Parisian bakers and cheese mongers, many of whom have actually lost business from the games, go around the boats or the Trocadero with big baskets of snacks for the weary athletes? What is the PR value of Steph Curry eating a smear of selles-sur-cher on a crusty hunk of baguette? These are not very good ideas, but my point is there were plentiful opportunities to include Paris’ vibrant small businesses and craftspeople in the spectacle, not symbolically, not in dance form, but literally.

Sacre Coeur Viewing Area

I’ve never actually been to the Eiffel Tower, but I’ve seen it plenty of times from different viewpoints. Several of the ceremony’s key moments—the Eiffel Tower light show, fireworks, and ballon-cauldron lighting—were highly visible from afar. Why not set up a fanzone/viewing area at some of the farther-off locations so more people can participate in the viewing? Ask any guidebook or website where to get the best free view of Paris and you’ll probably be told the summit of Montmartre outside the Sacre Couer Basilica. I would have put a big official viewing area here.

Maybe they needed… a bigger stadium

The opening montage made a big deal about how this ceremony was NOT in a stadium. That wasn’t totally true, the parade ended in the temporary arena built in the Trocadero. By the time the ceremony shifted to this spot most of the athlete delegations appeared to be gone, and the ones that remained to watch the boring speeches stood wearily in the pouring rain. The Olympics is supposed to be a symbolic (some would say superficial) display of shared humanity. As beautiful as much of the ceremony was I thought we were denied the powerful visual of athletes and people of all nations standing together. The delegations were stranded on boats away from fans and other nations (except for some hilarious shared boats like the one Portugal shared with Qatar and North Korea) and then milled about in a temporary arena that was 40% a useless stage and 40% seats for people in suits. We were denied moments like the ones below.

This is an extension of my criticism of the ceremony in general - Obsessed with Paris as a grand piece of architecture but not so much with it as a living, vibrant mass of humanity. The slightly corny dance numbers we typically get in stadium-bound ceremonies at least showcase the talent, culture, and history of the host country’s inhabitants. I hope Paris isn’t the last city to attempt a ceremony in its streets, rivers, and public places — it did a good enough job to show this type of thing is possible, and in moments, awe-inspiring. But I hope the next city to do it is as eager to show off its people as its buildings.

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