Paris goes out with a bang and gives LA tough act to follow
Crowd so upbeat the closing ceremony felt like opening night at Glastonbury while Americans go to the movies
If you want an indication of how transformative the Paris Olympics have been, it came when it was announced to the crowd gathered in the Stade de France for the closing ceremony that president Emmanuel Macron was in the building.
A remarkable thing happened after his name was read out: it was not booed. In fact, it was greeted with a polite ripple of applause. Given how unpopular he was as recently as a month ago, that is an extraordinary turnaround in his fortunes. And it has been delivered entirely by a fortnight of running, jumping and swimming which has made a country apparently fractured beyond repair unite in sporting delight.
It was an infectious demeanour evident in everyone gathered to mark the end of the show. This crowd was so upbeat it was like being at the opening night of Glastonbury. Athletes, volunteers, spectators all were so charged with the adrenalin rush of the past two weeks you half expected Ed Miliband to step in and announce the National Grid was going to run off Paris’s vibes.
There are certain things a closing ceremony is obliged to do. It has to wave a lot of flags, it has to get thousands of athletes on to the premises in an apparent never-ending stream,
it has to welcome the new members of the International Olympics Committee athletes commission. Not to mention show almost fetishised respect for the Olympic flame.
Such has been the triumph of these Games, however, every tedious process here was greeted with enthusiasm. Nothing, not the absurd surfeit of symbolism, not an excess of interpretive dance, not even a speech of colossal tedium from outgoing IOC chief Thomas Bach could subvert the sense of fun.
As was clear in one moment of delicious anarchy that threatened to undermine the entire self-referential farrago. Hundreds of athletes were invited to head down towards the star-shaped stage which had been erected to highlight the theatrics. But when the French band Phoenix took the lead from George Michael at the London closing ceremony and performed one too many tracks from their new album, they were surrounded by people who had spent the past fortnight hurtling round the BMX track or contracting E. coli from marathon swimming in the Seine. It was a lovely sight. And one obviously rapidly shut down by the organisers, who had to ask repeatedly for the athletes to leave the stage.
But what a closing ceremony is mainly about is handing on the Olympic baton to the next host. You wonder what they might do in Los Angeles in four years’ time to match all this. It will be their third Games. The last was in 1984 when the opening ceremony involved a bloke in a rocket pack and the closing one featured Lionel Ritchie doing an extended version of his hit All Night Long which indeed went on all night long.
They will, though, have to go some way to match what Paris offered. Everything here worked. Not least, the public transport. The new metro station at St-denis opened in June and, through these Games has whisked thousands quickly and efficiently from the Stade de France.
It was like that across the city. In LA the closest they have to an integrated public transport system is Uber. More to the point, the city has none of the landmarks that have been used to such effect by Paris; there is very little in its architecture that even the most enthusiastic BBC reporter would describe as “iconic”.
So what will it offer? From the US contribution to the closing ceremony we can only suspect scale. And bombast. Not to mention Tom Cruise abseiling from the stadium roof to snaffle the Olympic flag and take it westwards.
Everything that happened thereafter was in a filmed sequence projected on the stadium screens. It included him doing some pointless parachuting, then tearing past the Hollywood sign with three added Os to mirror the Olympic rings. It all ended up with a performance from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. They were not playing live, they were not in France, they had been recorded thrashing about on Long Beach. Even Snoop Dogg, who has spent the whole of the last couple of weeks being photographed all over Paris, did a turn rapping up on the big screen, not in person. Thus it became abundantly clear that LA will do to the Olympics what it does to everything: turn it into a movie.
At least Paris did it all live, in glorious technicolor. And whatever the nonsense – what exactly was the obsession with unidentified hooded figures? – it went out with a bang. A very loud, very flashy bang. Now it is over to LA. The fact is, in four years’ time the world’s most self-confident city has a heck of an act to follow.
before climbing up onto the multishaped stage – designed to represent the five continents and the oceans – that had covered much of the pitch.
An announcement went over the public address system twice, in both French and English, saying, “Dear athletes please leave the stage”. Stewards also intervened and gestured for the athletes to get down. Some complied but others initially stayed put, with the French indie rock band Phoenix simply starting its set surrounded by excited athletes who began dancing and forming a circle for the performers.
Some other athletes seemed to take this as an invitation to get back onto the stage but, with stewards joining them and taking a more active role, the numbers gradually receded and most calmly dismounted.
The stage was emptied completely after about 10 minutes. It appeared that many of the athletes had initially got up on the stage without realising they were only being invited to the edge. Others lingered for some time after the request to leave, and while it was briefly chaotic, there was no indication that it was anything more serious than high spirits.
Phoenix continued their set regardless, ahead of later performances in Los Angeles by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Snoop Dogg.