PARIS — Tony Estanguet is one of the great French Olympians of all time, a canoeist who is the country’s first athlete to have won gold at three different Games.
Of the four Olympics in which he participated, the 2008 Games in Beijing was the only time Estanguet, who is now president of the Paris 2024 Olympic committee, did not win.
Advertisement
A nice consolation, he served as French flag bearer for the opening ceremony that summer in 2008. Yet it is not the opening ceremony of the four in which he marched that he most fondly remembers.
“I remember very well all four, but for me, very strongly the first one, when I entered in Sydney in the Olympic Stadium for the opening ceremony for my first games,” Estanguet said from the sprawling Paris Games headquarters in Saint-Denis.
“It was two days before my competition, and then everything stops and you feel something very strong, to be a part of something unique,” Estanguet said. “So I know how important it is for the athletes. I know that it is also important for all the people involved, because it’s the biggest TV audience of the Games. It’s more than 1 billion people watching the opening ceremony, so in one night, in three hours’ time, you have to send a very strong message of what those games would be about.”
The Paris Games, with Estanguet in charge, aim to send the strongest, most audacious opening statement in the history of the modern Olympics.
Organizers have devised a July 26 opening ceremony that is a floating parade along the Seine River — a 3.7-mile journey in which delegations from 200 countries will board 100 boats for a 45-minute ride that begins near the national library, winds past the Cathedral of Notre Dame (still under repair after a devastating fire in 2019) and the Louvre, passes by all of Paris’ famous centrally located gardens, and ends at the Eiffel Tower.
Imagine, from a U.S. Olympic perspective, LeBron James, Simone Biles, Katie Ledecky, and Justin Thomas standing on the same boat, one foot on the rail, waiving to the north and south of the world-famous river as they approach a glittering Eiffel Tower.
Overall, 15,000 athletes are expected for the Paris Games, including numerous international basketball and golf stars (like, say, French sensation Victor Wembanyama, and Rory McIlroy), to say nothing of the stars of traditional Olympic sports like track and field. No Summer Olympics has ever opened outside a stadium.
Spectators are expected to number in the hundreds of thousands and will view the parade from the banks of the river, either with a ticket they purchased or through a lottery of free tickets that has yet to take place.
Estanguet and his chief deputies studied, considered, and dissected their own plan for 1.5 years before announcing it in 2021. Three years later, with wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East, and some nine years after the Paris terrorist attacks, the 2024 Games will open on the Seine River, organizers told The Athletic on Thursday.
Advertisement
Contingency plans, for security or other concerns, are related to the size of the crowds, and not a potential moving of the ceremony to a more traditional setting, like a stadium.
“We have different plans, but all plans focus on having the ceremony on the river Seine,” said Lambis Konstantinidis, director of planning and coordination for the Paris Games and a veteran of multiple Olympic organizing efforts.
For months in Paris, French security experts have raised doubts about securing the banks of the Seine, and in December French President Emmanuel Macron said there was “obviously a Plan B, a Plan C” in the face of elevated security risks.
“For us to come out and make this sort of bold commitment, we had a significant reassurance from the authorities that (securing an on-river opening ceremony) was feasible,” Konstantinidis said. “It requires means, it requires investment, but what the President said — we’re already doing. We have to have a contingency plan, but we need to have one anyway for a number of reasons that are not all security-related. … It’s not about having it at the river Seine or in the stadium or someone else, but, could it look different?”
Konstantinidis said organizers were still determining an attendance target, originally quoted at 600,000 spectators, that could be significantly reduced but still count in the hundreds of thousands.
Paris organizers say there will be roughly 2,000 private security guards in the seating venues closest to the river and about 45,000 security forces on the outer perimeter — 15 times the number of Paris police normally deployed for the entire Paris historical district.
Estanguet said unlike typical opening ceremonies, which begin with performance art and conclude with the procession of athletes and torch lighting, the 2024 opening ceremony will begin with the athletes floating down the river, and performances interspersed along the parade route. The athletes will exit boats at the Eiffel Tower, and sit in the courtyard for the closing of the event and torch lighting.
Advertisement
“It has to be a little bit the signature of Paris 2024 in a way that, from the beginning, we really try to achieve something new, something audacious,” Estanguet said. “How to put sport into the city, how to bridge between sport and culture and celebrate France, celebrate the power of our history, our main landmarks, and definitely, at the end of the day we thought, ‘What a good idea to not remain in a stadium and be into the city to open the games, make it more spectacular.’”
GO DEEPER
Sports media predictions for 2024: Tom Brady joins Fox, Olympics rebound and more
(Top photo of a boat passing in front of the Eiffel Tower during a July 2023 test of the opening ceremony: Catherine Steenkeste / Getty Images)
