The 2024 Olympic Games and several ways to enjoy Paris

In addition to the audiovisual coverage of the vast majority of live competitions, highlights that are renewed several times during the day, special productions and clips that turn sports into artistic manifestations, the Olympic Broadcasting System (OBS) generates for the different rightholders a series of images characteristic of the city hosting the Olympic Games, commonly defined as beauty shots.

For many of us who had the enormous fortune to cover these competitions journalistically, the possibilities of getting to know these cities are reduced to taking the hop-on hop-off a few hours before taking the plane back home. Or get to know the Opera House (Sydney), the Parthenon (Athens), Tiananmen (Beijing), Westminster (London), Christ the Redeemer (River) or Shibuya (Tokyo) through these real-time television images.

In honor of this mix between tradition and innovation, Paris 2024 will be the first Olympic venue that will allow us to enjoy all its charm from the very - and very original - opening ceremony.

With the Seine as the common thread, our athletes will for a while become privileged customers of several Bateaux Mouches and we, from home, will confirm that, if anything adds charm to the charming French capital, it is discovering how many of its architectural icons -from the Eiffel Tower to the Orsay Museum- can be enjoyed from the river.

Nothing too different from what the French decided to offer us with many of the competition venues. Because just as for some, tennis and boxing being played at Roland Garros may be a charming no-brainer, most of the other 34 spaces reserved for the other events are full of history and glamor. From Invalides, La Concorde, the Grand Palais, the Hotel de Ville or Trocadero in the heart of the city to the Palace of Versailles, the basis for equestrian events, every minute of the sixteen official days promises to be a tribute to Coubertin and the ideological cradle of modern Olympism.

However, it will not be the first time that a mega-sporting event has been tempted to place the beauty of Paris on a level equivalent to the sporting event.

25 years ago, the opening party of the Football World Cup also celebrated Paris in a very special way.

The day before Brazil beat Scotland in the opening match at the Stade de France, a ceremony lasting more than four hours navigated between the sophistication typical of French culture and the final feeling of not knowing if we had witnessed genius or absurdity.

This is how it happened. Four giant bionic dolls over 20 meters tall represented Africa, Europe, Asia and America. Oceania had no reference, perhaps because it had no country to represent it in the tournament.

They all came out of equidistant places, with respect to the Place de la Concorde, where thousands of guests were no longer waiting for Marie Antoinette to be condemned - it is not a bad joke but a precise historical reference - but rather for our boys (Romeo, Ho, Mouse and Pablo, their names) who were marching at an unstable pace from the Pont Neuf, the Arc de Triomphe or the Champ de Mars.

The production was a television success: who doesn’t like to imaginarily travel around such a city. Even more eager to see the start of a world cup.

However, the plot of the party left us somewhat perplexed even to those of us who, faced with the challenge of having to accompany the images with a more or less explanatory story, received a detailed instruction one day before the eve.

It wasn’t just the extension of the party. Not even the dubious charm of the dolls. Nor was the strange appearance of little silver men who practiced an indecipherable dance. The really unlikely thing was that, after such a production and before an audience of hundreds of millions around the planet, we found out that the script had come to an end when the extras were removed from the square and the TV was overprinting the closing titles.

Hardly anything like that could happen to the next Parisian party. But, just in case it should occur to anyone to get out of the way, it doesn’t hurt to alert us.