Watching the Paris Olympics from France

I want to start by admitting that I’m not much of a sports fan.  I never played sports growing up and I’ve never really had a team that I supported.  In fact, the idea of loyally supporting a professional team has always seemed a little bit strange to me, given that the only thing that is really city or state linked and unchanging is the uniform.  I think that international competitions like the Olympics or the various World Cups have seemed more interesting to me because national teams do have some geographical consistency. in that their competitors come from their country.

The first Olympic Games I remember watching were in 1984. Mary Lou Retton won the individual all-around gymnastics competition, with perfect 10s on the vault and floor exercise. Carl Lewis won four gold medals in track and field, and synchronized swimming made its Olympic debut.

The gymnastics events, both women’s and men’s, have remained my favorite Olympic events to watch, but I’ve never watched very much of the games. I haven’t had a tv at home since 2007, which certainly didn’t help – I’m pretty sure that this is the first year that people who don’t have basic cable can watch the Olympics on a streaming platform, in this case Peacock.  In the last ten days, I’ve watched more than I ever have before of the Olympics, but with a decidedly French twist.

We watched the four-hour opening ceremony, which was shown entirely without commercials in France.  I read the reviews from English speaking countries the next day, but I’m here to tell you that the French LOVED it and are incredibly proud of it.  They are celebrating the audacity of being the first to hold the opening ceremony not in a stadium but throughout the city, the beauty of Paris as shown through the admittedly very long event, and the pageantry of the rest: the performances from the accordionist, the woman who sang La Marseillaise from the roof of the Grand Palais, Lady Gaga, all the dancers, a headless Marie Antoinette singing with heavy metal band Gojira in front of the burning Conciergerie, the flaming piano on a volcanic mound in the water, the mechanical horse that rode up the Seine, and yes, even the nearly naked blue man who rose from a platter of fruit in front of a tableau that looked like a recreation of the Last Supper scene by drag queens. 

It helped that we had a constant stream of commentary that explained what the various elements were meant to celebrate.  Many of them were nods to key scenes in the history of Paris, but many more were pointed references to France’s core values of liberty, equality, and fraternity.  The French were proud to host the first Olympic games with an equal number of male and female athletes.  This is why the Olympic Flame, a spectacular cauldron suspended from a hot air balloon that floats over Paris each night, was lit by two French athletes together, one man and one woman. 

Several of the performances were meant to celebrate inclusion and diversity, and not surprisingly were criticized by the far right in France and elsewhere: a key performance by French Malian singer Aya Nakamura, who redefined what it means to be French; the singing and dancing drag queens, the last supper scene, and the love triangle drama in the National Library, a nod to the Francois Truffaut cinema masterpiece Jules and Jim (which was also referenced extensively in Emily in Paris).  The naked blue man was Philippe Katerine, a beloved French performer, and was meant to remind us that the original Olympics in Greece consisted of entirely naked male athletes.

I was very tired as the ceremony neared the end and wanted to go to bed, but I’m glad that Christian made me stay awake.  The light display on the Eiffel tower was wonderful, as was the final performance by Celine Dion, whom the French consider one of their own even though she is Canadian.

The French are also, justifiably I think, proud of the venues and the way they are showcasing Paris.  The most prized is the beach volleyball court at the Eiffel Tower Stadium, a temporary installation set up on the Place Trocadero with a spectacular view of the Eiffel Tower on the other side of the Seine. 

The Grand Palais, where the fending events were held, is also incredibly beautiful with colored lights and soaring glass ceilings.  The cycling races snaking through the streets of Paris lined by thousands of spectators were striking, and the risky commitment to cleaning up the River Seine so that athletes could swim in it paid off.

In an intentional move to host the most sustainable Olympics in modern times, only one new structure was built: the Aquatics Center.  Intentionally located in one of the poorest suburbs of Paris and planned to be a combination professional and neighborhood sports center after the Olympics, it was constructed from sustainable and recycled materials and includes 5,000 square meters of solar panels on its roof, supplying more than enough energy for the facility.

Christian was on vacation for the first ten days of the Olympics, so we watched quite a lot of the coverage even though we were also traveling in the Vosges and Alsace.  Here are some things I noticed comparing US coverage with French coverage:

Not surprisingly, it’s much easier to watch the Olympics when you are in the same time zone.  The most exciting events are schedule between 6 and 11pm.  There are two free government-owned television channels that are showing nothing but the Olympics, all day every day. 

There are very few commercials. The key partners/sponsors (which include French brands like Louis Vitton and Carrefour, as well as global brands like Samsung and Coca Cola) all have beautifully made five to ten second clips.  A typical commercial break lasts two to three minutes and features three to four of those short clips, followed by two or three thirty second ads.  After doing quite a bit of sampling using the stopwatch on my phone, my estimate is that there is a maximum of five minutes of commercials per hour.

There is an odd custom of interviewing not just the winners, but also the losers live on national tv.  You have someone who has just had his or her Olympic medal dreams dashed moments ago interviewed with questions like, “How you do feel about coming in 6^th?”  They respond graciously, saying things like “I’m just happy to be here, and I did my best.”  Maybe we do this on US television too, but it feels to me somehow like not the right moment for such questions.

There are things that I feel like I’m missing out on. There are no athlete backstories, the video portraits that help us get to know the competitors and make us root for them.  I used to think these were cheesy, but the Olympics aren’t the same without them.  I’ve read about pommel horse guy in the US media, but never seen him.  We also don’t have Snoop Dogg, and after reading US coverage I feel like that’s a loss too.  We had this guy instead at the 3 on 3 basketball competition, dressed up as Obelix from the famous French comics.

With two channels fully dedicated to Olympic coverage, I thought that I would definitely be able to see the gymnastics events, but no: like the coverage in the US, the French focus on events with French athletes, and there was only one (!) French contender in a single gymnastics event – the rings.  We saw about 15 minutes featuring him, and a few very short montages (all less than ten minutes) with some of the star performances by athletes like Simone Biles and Kaylia Nemour, who normally would be on the French team but was representing Algeria at these games. 

What did we see instead?  An awful lot of fencing and judo, sports where France wins a lot of medals.  After ten days of competition, France has won 44 medals, 17 of them in these two sports.  Both were opaque to me: I didn’t know how the scoring worked, and even after Christian explained it I couldn’t really tell what was happening, especially with judo.  And I know it’s a serious sport and of course I have tremendous respect for the athletes, but to a novice judo looks like the kind of “wrestling” we did as kids: you face each other and circle around a bit, trying to grab the other person’s wrists and batting away their attempts to grab yours.  Once you’re locked at the wrists you try to sweep the other person’s leg and get them down to the ground.  The judo went on for days… There are seven different weight classes times two for men’s and women’s.  So 14 individual competitions where we had to watch the qualifying rounds, then the quarter finals, semifinals, and finals.  

We also saw a lot of swimming thanks to Leon Marchand, the young star who has become the darling of the Olympics for the French.  He won four gold medals in individual events and a bronze a team relay.

Since Christian will watch anything that has a French athlete in contention for a medal, I’ve been exposed to a lot of sports that I’ve never seen before: rugby 7s (where France won gold), 3 on 3 basketball, rowing, canoeing, archery, BMX racing, ping pong, dressage, steeplechase, field hockey, water polo, and lots of handball.  Adding on the more well-known competitions like track and field, tennis, soccer, and volleyball and I’ve seen more than half of all possible sports (29 out of 51), with another week left to go.

We have tickets to one event: a semi-final soccer game that will be held in Lyon today, August 5^th.  We didn’t know when we bought the tickets six months ago who would be playing, but it turns out that it will be France vs. Egypt, and I’m sure that the atmosphere in the stadium will be like nothing I’ve experienced before. 

I’d like to hear about your experiences in the comments.  What events have you been enjoying most, what did you think of the opening ceremony, and what else am I missing out on by only seeing French coverage?