The Paris 2024 Opening Ceremony delivered a magical evening that, in retrospect, maybe we all needed. I, at least, did after a day-long impromptu roadtrip from Nantes to Lille thanks to saboteurs whose coordinated acts crippled France’s famed high speed rail network.
As a historian of modern France, I very much understood and appreciated the references peppered throughout the four hour-long show. Here in France, we’re removed from the U.S. broadcast, and France TV was good: pure coverage uninterrupted by announcers, analysis, or commercials. It was a huge comms victory for the Paris 2024 organizing committee, and the country as a whole, a refutation of the far right wing’s racist, anti-semitic, xenophobic, ultra nationalist rhetoric that’s sowed such acrimony. It was a win for the republic’s aspirational ideals of liberté, fraternité, egalité, even if we know reality can be quite different.
One of the more striking ways that France communicated, represented, and negotiated to the world—and to and amongst itself—in this sports-centric spectacle was the juxtaposition between the dead queen and a new one. I’m referring to the segments that spanned from the Conciergerie to the Institute de France. The former was the site of Marie Antoinette’s imprisonment before her 1793 execution via guillotine; the latter is the seat of the various academies in France—those who '“safeguard” vaunted “French” culture.
The staging of Aya Nakamura, the biggest Francophone artist in the world, singing in front of the (usually pretty conservative) Republican Guard outside the Institute de France conveyed a passing of the baton from older ideas of ‘France’ to newer ones, of a narrow set of cultural arbiters to a more diverse, inclusive form.
It seems that many Americans were left behind as NBC’s coverage was a recipe that emphasized the fluff and not enough of the nuts and bolts that would have helped U.S. viewers better understand and relate to not just the theatrical and musical parts of the program, but also the various boats of international elite athletes themselves.
That’s why one of the things that I'm thinking about very much during the Paris Games is how the media, particularly on the sports side, shapes our understanding of the world…and how its deficiencies leaves us woefully underprepared or under-informed. This plays into how different nations broadcast or report on the Games, not just their own athletes. There’s naturally a huge dose of nationalism that goes into any media coverage, but what do we miss by an overemphasis on, say, Team USA, and not enough about their best competitors or the host country themselves—and their long sports ties to the United States?
That’s my challenge to you during these Games: live the high drama, the pyrrhic victories, but also think about what you’d really want to know about non Team USA competitors, particularly in those sports in which the United States is not as strong.
What of their individual paths? What of the systems that produced them?
What does a country that excels in a certain sport communicate, represent, negotiate to the rest of the world?
And how does better understanding these things shape your understanding of the games or our global world today?
Bonus Section
Tune in to last Saturday’s BBC World Sports Hour show to hear my take on this, as well as a fascinating set of programing that includes what Olympians wear for dinner. Thank you for having me on the show, Caroline Barker!