From our Olympics correspondent in Paris – The organisers of the 2024 Paris Olympics wanted to make the city's monuments the centrepiece of the Games. As the men and women's beach volleyball quarter finals unfolded under the shimmering heights of the Eiffel Tower on Tuesday night, it was hard to argue with their vision.
Forty-five minutes into the first game of beach volleyball in Paris’s Eiffel Tower Stadium on Tuesday, the sun doesn’t seem to have moved an inch in the sky. An hour in, you start to get the feeling that it never will.
There are parts of the world, high in the Arctic Circle, where the sun never slips below the horizon in summer; perhaps, you think, the Earth has tilted sometime in the night, and France is now one of them. Even at 6pm, the weight of the sun is suffocating.
The crowd couldn’t care less. They’ve come by the thousands, bronzed or burnt, clammy with sunscreen, throwing themselves body and lungs into the MCs’ every whim. The closest beach is more than a hundred miles away, but the atmosphere here is practically Mediterranean.
In the tree-lined avenue leading up to the arena’s doors, curving metal misters spray clouds of cold water over grateful tourists. Ice cream stands are testing even anglo-saxon limits for waiting in line. And over it all, the scalding shadow of the Eiffel Tower.
When the organisers of the 2024 Paris Olympics said they wanted to hold the Games in the heart of Paris, this is probably the kind of thing they had in mind. The stands of the Eiffel Tower Stadium were set up earlier this year on the Champs de Mars especially for the Olympics, and to say that we’re sitting in the tower’s shadow is somewhat underselling just how much the iconic monument fills the sky over our heads.
It’s an incongruous setting for beach volleyball. Like the skateboarding, breakdancing and BMX events being held in the Place de la Concorde across the river, the men and women’s beach volleyball is presented with an easy lack of etiquette that feels centuries away from the aristocratic strictures of equestrian or fencing. The players jog barefoot onto the sand, the men in loose singlets and neon sunglasses, the women wearing crop tops and bikini bottoms.
The first game of the quarter finals pits Germany against the Netherlands. As each pair of players warms up their serves, the commentator cheerfully announces that the sand beneath their naked feet has reached around 38 degrees.
Before the game, the MC gives the crowd their instructions. When an unstoppable serve sends the ball streaking between the opposing two players, winning the point, they are to scream out “Ace, ace!”.
When one of the towering players strides up to the net and parries the ball with their outstretched arms, the crowd is to raise their own on a 45-degree angle, palm down, and pump them enthusiastically while chanting “Monster block, monster block!”. The crowd, delighted and a little bit dazed in the heat, complies every time.
As rake-wielding attendants sprint onto the pitch smooth out the sand between sets, a mime can be seen roaming the crowd. Dressed head-to-toe in fluorescent orange, his face caked in white, he’s rather hard to miss. Under the camera’s astonished eye he slathers himself in sunscreen, his tanned skin slowly disappearing beneath a blanket of white slop. In the circumstances, this doesn’t seem unreasonable.
The Germans take it away in straight sets. With just two players a side, it’s a lot of ground to cover, and they do – lunging, leaping, sometimes lurching across the sand to keep the ball in the air, scrabbling for position before they launch it across the net. It’s hard to tell from on high, but there are giants in the arena – one of the Germans, Nils Ehlers, is 6 '11'’. Speaking after the game, he said that it had been an intimidating setting.
“I was very nervous, for sure,” he said. “It’s amazing to play here in front of this crowd, and I’m so happy that we have the chance to play two times more.”
The next match saw Sweden win handily over Brazil. It’s another blow for the men’s team, who failed to win a medal in Tokyo as well despite hailing from the sport's spiritual home.
When the women’s quarter finals start at 9pm that evening, the sun is hovering a finger’s width above the horizon. Half an hour into the Australia-Switzerland match, the clouds have caught fire and the sunset smoulders across the whole western sky.
You’d think a game between a land-locked country and one with beaches on all sides would be uneven, but the Swiss still manage to pull ahead early before the straggling Aussies catch up to claim the first set.
By the time the second set begins, a change is starting to come over the Eiffel Tower. Almost imperceptibly, a golden glow kindles in the tower’s base, crawling up the length of the monument until the whole spire is transformed into a cage of light and shadow.
As the last lingering traces of the sunset are wiped from the sky, the Swiss claim the second set, pushing the match into a frantic third round. The Australians triumph, leaping into each other’s arms as the crowd sets the stands swaying with their joy.
Before the next match can start, the stadium lights shudder and go out. Urged on by the MCs, the crowd holds the flashlights on their phones high, filling the arena with stars. In an instant, the Eiffel Tower responds in kind, a thousand shivering lights shimmering up and down its length.
The audience members nearest the press stands scramble from their seats to stand in the empty row above the broadcasters benches, snapping hasty selfies. It's hard to imagine they'll do the moment justice.
