The blue nude man who bizarrely stole the show at the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony
It was an Opening Ceremony with a difference as the Olympic Games officially kicked off in Paris. And one man stole the show.
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A beheaded Marie Antoinette starts singing while a French heavy metal band thrashes guitars and fire erupts across the River Seine.
There’s Les Mis, dancers from Moulin Rouge, Celine Dion singing her heart out, the can-can, Lady Gaga performing on a golden stage, a metal horse galloping across the famous river and weightlifting, boxing, polevaulting Minions who steal the Mona Lisa.
And, most bizarrely, a portly man painted in blue and draped in strings of flower and fruit. His name was Gédéon a French artist and he was apparently embodying the Greek God Dionysus.
It was a moment when commentators from around the world were left speechless. Organisers said the performance was to make us aware, through a new humoristic and poetic song, of the absurdity of violence between human beings. Job done.
So Bravo! They pulled it off.
The lavishly experimental opening ceremony for the Paris Olympics promised to be different and we know this for a fact – it was. Finishing with the Olympic cauldron floating above the city in a hot-air balloon.
Torrential rain in Paris made it hard work for the forecast 350,000 spectators along the Seine. You couldn’t blame the hordes who left early to seek shelter in the city’s bars, cafes and restaurants as the most madcap and unpredictable spectacle unfolded.
It was like no ceremony the Olympics has ever seen and left us with a vexing question. Will we ever see it again?
Do we want to? Only one city could pull this off.
Paris.
The five-hour spectacle fused sport and art in the heart of one of the world’s most vibrant and flamboyant cities. It was unpredictable, creative and absurdly bold. The highs were soaringly high, but the lows sank like a stone. C’est la vie. It was clearly a made-for-television production.
Antoinette sang her pretty little head off, so to speak, in a killer segment that showed the wildly creative ceremony at its inspired best.
Paris’s derring do to host the Olympics’ first ceremony outside a main stadium was free to spectators, and a free-for-all in diversity of content, grandly switching haphazardly from the parade of athletes’ boats to Lady Gaga singing in French on the banks of the Seine to a mystery hooded centrepiece character zipping through the streets … only in Paris.
Did the experiment work? In the end, yes. Footage of the Minions huffing, puffing and giggling through their slapstick Olympic routine while squealing “oo la la” and mocking French stereotypes, and getting their hands on the Mona Lisa, was grandly humorous and entertaining.
Straight away, the Marseillaise was sung by mezzo-soprano Axelle Saint-Cirel in a completely ridiculous yet wonderful change of tone and pace. If you wanted an example of the unpredictable course of events, there it was.
All over the shop might be a better description. How Parisian. There were times when it seemed a complete French farce and times in the latter stages when it soared to thrilling heights. Future Games? Depends who you’re trying to please. For spectators, you need a stadium. They can sit back and enjoy a show like a night at the theatre. For TV viewers, you can zip all over the city if you want to. But not every city is Paris.
It was wet and wild and ultimately, wonderful. What it lacked for most of the evening was a truly killer moment. The benchmarks in Olympic history? The deeply stirring 21-gun salute when 85,000 people packed Wembley Stadium in the first post-WWII Olympics at London in 1948; Etta James belting out When the Saints Go Marching In and Bill Suitor wearing a jetpack to fly into the Memorial Coloseum at Los Angeles in 1984; Paralympic archer Antonio Rebollo shooting the arrow that lit the flame at Barcelona in 1992; a determined, Parkinson’s-afflicted Muhammad Ali carrying the torch and lighting the cauldron at Atlanta in 1996.
The Minions and Marie Antoinette didn’t match that.
More benchmarks? The Olympic rings being formed by 120 stock horses at Sydney in 2000, when the Stadium Australia floor was transformed into the multicoloured Great Barrier Reef, Kyle Minogue razzled, dazzled and sang her heart out and Cathy Freeman lit the cauldron after an anxious, unscripted four-minute delay; 2008 people drumming to the same pounding beat before acrobats tumbled Cirque-style across a 60-foot suspended planet at the Birds Nest at Beijing in 2008; Mr Bean tinkling the synthesizer during the London Symphony Orchestra’s rendition of Chariots of Fire before Queen Elizabeth’s cameo alongside Bond, James Bond, at London in 2012.
The Minions and Marie Antoinette fell short there, too. Then came the galloping steel horse. A great and ghostly image.
The biggest downside threatened to be the more low-key entrance of the athletes. Australia’s flag-bearers Jess Fox and Eddie Ockenden would normally enter Stade de France in an explosion of noise and atmosphere while walking ahead of their teammates. Now they simply stood on a boat with everyone else – and yet they were stoked.
Ditto for the French contingent. The hosts entering the stadium of their home Olympics is meant to be a peak moment of national fervor but even without the traditional march into the arena … all looked thrilled out of their wits.
Never to be Seine again? Will another city copy the format and take it to waterways and streets? Again, there’s only one Paris. A French artist called Gédéon looked like a naked blue smurf with a yellow beard and great singing voice.
The Eiffel Tower was a stunning late-night backdrop as the clock approached midnight. The illuminated steel horse carrying the Olympic flag was a stunning image. Athletes were all smiles near the Eiffel Tower. The ceremony was like plenty of the people you meet in Paris. Crazy, zany, beautiful, flawed, nonsensical, passionate and completely intriguing. Bravo! The French were nearly too clever for their own good.
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