From our special correspondent in Paris – Paris woke up to a grey first day of the Olympic Games Saturday, with rain forcing the men’s skateboarding to postpone its first event until Monday and a number of cyclists skidding off their bikes in the individual time trials through the heart of Paris. But Australia’s Grace Brown weathered the storm, winning her first gold medal in the women’s time trial.
The party was over but the rain showed no signs of slowing. For the hundreds of thousands of spectators who lined the banks of the River Seine Friday night to watch the delirious Opening Ceremony of the 2024 Olympics, the relentless downpour had done little to take away from the night’s myth and majesty.
After an armada of almost 7,000 athletes floated down the river that cuts through France’s capital, the electric evening was crowned by the golden ascent of the Olympic cauldron over the roofs of Paris in a hot air balloon, carried aloft by the sound of Edith Piaf’s “Hymne à l’amour” sung by Canadian superstar Céline Dion from the Eiffel Tower.
But as a grey day dawned over Paris for the newly opened 2024 Olympic Games, the full weight of the unseasonably stubborn rain became harder to ignore. The preliminary round of the much-anticipated street skateboarding event, scheduled to be held in the open-air Place de la Concorde in the centre of Paris, had to be postponed until Monday due to the worsening weather.
While the French team took the delay in stride, saying they would use the time to practise in a covered skatepark in Paris’s eastern suburbs until the weather cleared, it was an unsettling start to the 2024 Summer Olympics – and a frustrating moment for spectators hoping to see some of the world’s youngest Olympians launch themselves into the skate park in Paris’s largest public square.
A soggy start
Driven by an increasingly strained sense of solidarity with the men and women cyclists who would soon be hurtling through the streets of Paris from the Invalides to the Alexander III Bridge for the individual time trials Saturday afternoon, FRANCE 24’s damp yet dogged correspondents went to scout out the route on the capital’s bicycle-sharing app Vélib, hoping to catch some early watchers waiting to see the best cyclists in the world whirl past.
Hauling the lumbering lime green bikes from their cradles, we set off from near the François Mitterand Library on the banks of the Seine and followed the vast railway tracks that circle the city to the chestnut groves of the Bois de Vincennes east of Paris. It was through these green alleys that the cyclists would be passing on their way back to the city centre.
Almost immediately it became clear that this neck of the route was not going to be lined by eager fans for some hours yet, and almost as immediately it became clear why. The rain hammered everyone alike. The volunteers huddled behind their metal barriers, the gendarmes were heavy with weaponry, and the stern-faced Saturday-afternoon joggers and the plastic-wrapped delivery cyclists hauled warm meals to Parisians sensible enough to stay indoors.
Driven to shelter beneath the woods’ brilliant green leaves, we stowed our Vélibs in a waiting rack and trudged, drenched and defeated, to the nearest Metro station to see the cyclists off at the Hôtel des Invalides.
An ill wind
A cluster of neoclassical museums and monuments normally consecrated to France’s distant martial glories, the Invalides marked the starting point of a more than 32km route through the rain-slicked Paris streets.
As cyclist after cyclist shot out onto the track, the weather soon began to take its toll. A number of women cyclists skidded and fell on the route’s sharp turns, scrambling back onto their bikes to cross the finish line bloodied. Among those who fell was US cyclist Chloé Dygert, who still managed to snatch third place, missing out on silver by a slim second.
But some of the riders who grew up under France’s grey skies welcomed the worsening showers. French cyclist Audrey Cordon-Ragot, who came ninth in the women’s individual time trial, was upbeat about the day’s downpours.
“It’s my kind of weather, I love it,” she said after the race. “I’ve been training in the rain all through July in Brittany, so you can imagine that when I saw it was going to rain I was delighted.”
Her countrywoman Juliette Labous, who ranked fourth, agreed that the rain may have given them an edge, though she struggled to hide her disappointment at missing out on a medal by just nine seconds.
“We didn’t fall and I know there were a lot of girls who unfortunately did, and I hope that they didn’t hurt themselves,” she said. “But I think it worked a little bit in our favour. I like difficult conditions … I just tried not to think about it, and to give it everything I had.”
The first finals
Set on finding a sport that couldn’t be rained out, we took the Metro line as far as it would go. The Games’ first swimming events were taking place at La Défense, a business district in Paris's western suburbs that's more or less impossible to describe accurately without coming across as uncharitable.
The impersonal forces of global capital have decreed that the cities of the world shall raise up skyscrapers: Paris, defiant to the last, built them as far away from its city centre of museums and galleries as it decently could. Steel, glass, stone, concrete – you've seen it before, and will again.
But the sun has broken through the clouds at last and the final fragments of rain are shining as they fall. A volunteer perched on an improbable pink umpire’s chair is grinning through her megaphone as she directs the crowds into the arena, a towering edifice of curving white scales utterly unlike the harsh right angles that define the district’s office blocks.
Here in the womb of Paris's La Defense Arena, with the floodlights heavy on the pool's clear water, the grey skies are forgotten. The classics are echoing from the speakers and the crowd is transported, chanting their joy with each song that booms out.
As the competitors in the 100m women's butterfly semifinals are announced, the four corners of the stadium roar their support for their favourites. US swimmer Gretchen Walsh launches herself into the water, taking the first win of the evening and knocking one tenth of a second off the Olympic world record for good measure.
The men's 400m freestyle ushers in the first final of the 2024 Paris Olympics, with Germany's Lukas Maertens surging to first place followed by the Australian Elijah Winnington and South Korea's Kim Woo-min securing bronze.
Australian world-record holder Ariarne Titmus dominates the women’s 400m freestyle, leaving Canada’s Summer McIntosh and the US’s Katie Ledecky quite literally in her wake. The arena is packed with Australians shining in green and gold – they cheer their medallists to the echo, the morning's storm clouds high above and far away.
