Au revoir les jeux! As ever it just sounds a little better in French. And frankly everything has looked softer and more joyful seen through the lens of the Paris 2024 Olympics over the past 19 days. The last of which came to a formal end in Saint Denis with a closing ceremony that was genuinely uplifting in its echoes of the Summer Games that preceded it If was fitting the final note in Paris should be another show of colour.
These have been the most beautiful and cloudless of Games. Olympic lore dictates that closing ceremonies will always end up feeling like an overblown imposition. This time around you just got the feeling everyone present wanted a chance to say goodbye.
The ceremony is, of course, also the start of something, the ritual of the never-ending cycle, passing the flame to Los Angleles 2028, which was represented here by a hand of US political and celebrity might, and indeed by 62-year-old Tom Cruise jumping off a roof on a wire, which was presumably non‐negotiable, Tom was very clear on that. For Paris this has by now become a quietly gleeful hospital pass, Follow that. These have been the most vivid and visceral of Games, fully embedded in the city, and staged around structures and vistas that are in their own right a kind of emotional sucker punch.
Yeah. Just the Pont Alexandre III there covered with bleeding and spent triathletes. No, really.
I’m fine. Just hayfever. These qualities have now entered into the emotional register of the summer Games.
LA 20.