In an summary sense, I understood that the Paris Olympics could be somewhat completely different than editions held in years previous. Paris would host the primary summer time video games post-pandemic, to begin—the truth that Tokyo 2020, delayed till 2021, was, for apparent causes, a more-muted affair contributed to a way of pent-up enthusiasm (amongst followers, however particularly amongst athletes) within the months and weeks resulting in the opening ceremonies in France final week.
There was the Paris of all of it, too. The town first hosted the Olympics in 1900 (the primary fashionable Video games held exterior Greece), after which once more in 1924. Nevertheless it had been totally a century since one of many world’s most iconic cities had performed host.
These Video games additional promised an unprecedented collision of sports activities and high-end luxurious vogue thanks primarily to the French conglomerate LVMH’s sponsorship of the occasion. Almost each element would obtain a coat of high-end polish. Chaumet, the jeweler, would design and produce the medals. Berluti would costume the French delegation. And Louis Vuitton would design the whole lot from the case that carries the Olympic torch to the trays on which these medals could be introduced to victorious athletes. “By no means,” Tom Lamont wrote in a latest challenge of GQ, “has the collision between coveted luxurious items and enviable athletic expertise been so pronounced.”
It adopted, then, that these Olympics would even be an enormous draw for people well-known exterior of sports activities. Certainly, the likes of Zendaya, Steven Spielberg, and Pharrell (himself an LVMH worker of word) congregated for a celebration at (the place else?) the Fondation Louis Vuitton the night time earlier than the Video games opened.
I knew all of this, a minimum of intellectually, earlier than I obtained to Paris for a whirlwind 48-hour go to hosted by Louis Vuitton. This might be a distinct kind of Video games—quicker, larger, stronger, per the Olympic motto, but additionally larger, brighter, shinier than ever earlier than.
And but it didn’t actually sink in till I used to be boarding my flight in New York and heard a voice that made me do a double take. I’m a comparatively late-to-the-game Intercourse and the Metropolis fan, however even I acknowledged Sarah Jessica Parker providing a fluttery merci beaucoup to a flight attendant. Paris was useless set on charming the globe’s consideration in July and August for 2 weeks of athletic excellence. Why wouldn’t Carrie Bradshaw be there, too?
Because the opening ceremonies approached on Friday night time, the occasion’s organizers and the climate gave the impression to be in a tense however fraying standoff. It had been unseasonably gentle in Paris all summer time (“It’s been like fall,” a Parisian pal talked about), and the sky was grey and threatening.
The opening ceremonies had been themselves distinctive: slightly than maintain the standard theatrics-then-parade of countries in a stadium, the organizers designed an occasion that came about on the Seine itself, starting on the Pont d’Austerlitz within the east and terminating on the Trocadéro, the plaza throughout the river from the Eiffel Tower. Issues would get moist.
