Will Paris 2024 deliver the best ever opening ceremony of all time?

A flotilla of 100 boats carrying 10,500 athletes from 206 nations on the river Seine. Watched by hundreds of thousands of spectators along with a global TV audience of 1.5 billion, the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games 2024 promises to be a memorable spectacle.

If everything goes according to plans, the event penciled in for July 26, could well be the best ever opening ceremony in the history of the Olympics.

But for a ceremony of such gigantic scale, a lot can go wrong.

And that fact is giving the organisers of Paris 2024 sleepless nights.

What's so different with Paris 2020 opening ceremony?

For the first time in Olympic history, the Games will not open at a stadium but instead on a river.

“The entire city has been turned into a vast Olympic stadium. The Seine represents the track, and the quays the spectators’ stands,” commented Tony Estanguet, chief of the Paris 2024 organizing committee, in December 2021 while unveiling the concept of the ceremony.

Nearly 100 boats will sail across a 6-kilometer (about 3.7 miles) stretch of the Seine, winding east to west through Paris and passing by some of the city’s iconic bridges, landmarks (like the Notre-Dame and the Louvre), and Olympic venues (including the Grand Palais). The route will end near the Eiffel Tower at the Trocadéro, where the ceremony’s finale and official Olympic protocols, including the opening declaration by French President Emmanuel Macron, will take place.

What are they saying about it?

When sprint legend Usain Bolt, an eight-time gold medalist, got a glimpse of the sailing experience during last year’s presentation of the Olympic torch, he shared his excitement for the eventual Opening Ceremony and the crowd that would show up to watch: “Imagine everybody standing outside, across the bridges cheering people up,” he said. “I think it’s gonna be one of the best, if not the best Opening Ceremony.”

What are the concerns?

The biggest one is security. There has been a resurgence of terror attacks across Europe and there are fears that Paris 2024 will be a major target for extremists. All airports and airspace within a 90-mile radius around Paris will be closed around the time of the ceremony, amid authorities’ fears that the open setting could expose participants and attendees—among them an expected 120 heads of state, sovereigns, and heads of government—to drone attacks and snipers. In addition to scaling back the total crowd size and adjusting the free-ticket policy to be by invite-only instead of open registration, there will also be a 45,000-member security force—including over 2,000 foreign police—deployed around the French capital. –with inputs from agencies