In an abstract sense, I understood that the Paris Olympics would be a little different than editions held in years past. Paris would host the first summer games post-pandemic, to start—the fact that Tokyo 2020, delayed until 2021, was, for obvious reasons, a more-muted affair contributed to a sense of pent-up enthusiasm (among fans, but especially among athletes) in the months and weeks leading to the opening ceremonies in France last week.
There was the Paris of it all, too. The city first hosted the Olympics in 1900 (the first modern Games held outside Greece), and then again in 1924. But it had been fully a century since one of the world’s most iconic cities had played host.
These Games further promised an unprecedented collision of sports and high-end luxury fashion thanks primarily to the French conglomerate LVMH’s sponsorship of the event. Nearly every detail would receive a coat of high-end polish. Chaumet, the jeweler, would design and produce the medals. Berluti would dress the French delegation. And Louis Vuitton would design everything from the case that carries the Olympic torch to the trays on which those medals would be presented to victorious athletes. “Never,” Tom Lamont wrote in a recent issue of GQ, “has the collision between coveted luxury goods and enviable athletic talent been so pronounced.”
It followed, then, that these Olympics would also be a huge draw for folks famous outside of sports. Indeed, the likes of Zendaya, Steven Spielberg, and Pharrell (himself an LVMH employee of note) congregated for a party at (where else?) the Fondation Louis Vuitton the night before the Games opened.
I knew all of this, at least intellectually, before I got to Paris for a whirlwind 48-hour visit hosted by Louis Vuitton. This would be a different sort of Games—faster, higher, stronger, per the Olympic motto, but also bigger, brighter, shinier than ever before.
And yet it didn’t really sink in until I was boarding my flight in New York and heard a voice that made me do a double take. I’m a relatively late-to-the-game Sex and the City fan, but even I recognized Sarah Jessica Parker offering a fluttery merci beaucoup to a flight attendant. Paris was dead set on captivating the globe’s attention in July and August for two weeks of athletic excellence. Why wouldn’t Carrie Bradshaw be there, too?
As the opening ceremonies approached on Friday night, the event’s organizers and the weather appeared to be in a tense but fraying standoff. It had been unseasonably mild in Paris all summer (“It’s been like fall,” a Parisian friend mentioned), and the sky was gray and threatening.
The opening ceremonies were themselves unique: rather than hold the traditional theatrics-then-parade of nations in a stadium, the organizers designed an event that took place on the Seine itself, beginning at the Pont d’Austerlitz in the east and terminating at the Trocadéro, the plaza across the river from the Eiffel Tower. Things would get wet.
I caught the opening ceremonies from a Vuitton-hosted party on the balcony of a rooftop restaurant overlooking the Seine. (The Dior party was just down the hall; both restaurants are located atop a hotel also owned by LVMH.) The river-spanning nature of the event meant it was, in one sense, best consumed on TV. The French heavy metal band Gojira’s pyro-heavy, Marie Antoinette-decapitating performance, for instance, registered for me as a low rumble and faint flickers of light off to my left. While friends watching at home texted about the televised vignette culminating in a ménage á trois (that most French of innovations), I was captivated by smaller moments. Inside, the broadcast ran on two large televisions; at one point, as a jazz singer belted out La Marseillaise from the top of the Grand Palais, the room slowly clambered to their feet, hands over hearts, equal parts solemn and joyful. (That said, when the Pont des Arts shot off sparklers during Aya Nakamura’s showstopping performance? That was tight.)
The parade of nations, too, took on an interesting cast from our vantage point. I couldn’t see LeBron James, flagbearer—but what I could see was a group of staggeringly joyful American athletes, their energy unflagging despite hours of pouring rain, celebrating as one. The smallest nations rode in motorboats, while the biggest took over the bateaux mouche that ferry tourists down the Seine. I was taken with the countries in between, who found themselves sharing boats with one or two other nations. Whether intentional or not, it was the sort of gesture toward our common humanity and brotherhood that the Olympics generates more reliably than any other institution we’ve got. Online, conservative critics were clutching their pearls over the ceremony’s depiction of the Last Supper. On the river, the delegations from Uruguay and Ukraine, from Turkey and Tunisia, from Chinese Taipei and Tajikistan and Tchad, took what appeared to be a rainy but undeniably electric ride from one end of Paris to the other.
The next morning, I made my way to the northern suburb of Saint-Denis for the women’s synchronized three-meter springboard finals. I may as well have chosen it out of a hat, but the discipline seemed to me to represent everything I find most compelling about the Olympics: utter mastery of a sport whose intricacies might elude the every-four-years fan—but whose sheer impressiveness is undeniable.
Paris, proud to already have just about everything you’d need to throw an Olympics, is relying primarily on existing or to-be-disassembled venues. The spiffy wood-and-glass aquatics center, I learned, was the only new structure purpose-built for the Games.
I found my seat (made from recycled polymer collected from local schools) as the competitors were finishing their warm-up, bouncing forcefully on the board before bringing it back under control.
Synchronized diving, an Olympic sport since 2000, is fully preposterous, in the sense that I can’t believe anyone’s actually capable of doing it. Teams of two execute simultaneous dives on parallel diving boards; they’re judged individually (by three judges each) on execution and then collectively (by a further five more judges) on synchronization. Those scores are multiplied by a degree-of-difficulty rating corresponding to the divers’ intended maneuver. It is the sort of Olympic sport where simply executing a synchronous dive in the first place merits a civilian’s 10–and then you look at the scoreboard and learn that the judges found the bit of brainmelting athletic excellence you just witnessed worthy of, say, 6.5s across the board.
Clarity, at least, came easy at the top of the leaderboard. The Chinese duo of Chang Yani and Chen Yiwen—undefeated in major competitions since 2022—nailed all five of their dives and won gold by a considerable margin. (Alone among the teams, at least that I saw, they bowed to the crowd after their final effort.)
And then: drama. Having completed their slate of dives, U.S. team of Kassidy Cook and Sarah Bacon (known to friends, family, and now presumably a large chunk of the viewing public as Cook ‘n Bacon) found themselves in second, on a provisional podium with the third-place Brits, waiting only for Team Australia’s final effort.
Aussies Anabelle Smith and Maddison Keeney trailed the Americans by some 70 points, and the Brits by considerably less; a flawless dive would almost certainly catapult them into a bronze medal, or possibly even a silver. But Smith took off awkwardly, and seemed to initiate her twist a somersault ahead of her partner—a breathtaking athletic recovery, but also sporting catastrophe. The arena sucked in one enormous spontaneous breath, and then let out a sorrowful exhale. The dive meant the Australians would finish in fifth place.
The three teams took their place on the podium, and khaki-wearing LVMH stewards emerged with the medal trays, done up in Vuitton’s famous Damier check. The day before, I’d tagged along for a tour of the workshop (attached to Monsieur Vuitton’s 19th-century home) where custom orders are brought to life, and learned that designing and constructing the trays was a bit easier than crafting that cabinet that housed the Olympic torch.
The Chinese national anthem played, and each contestant received their medals. We all filed out of the arena, soon to be replaced by fans for platform diving, water polo, and all the rest.
I headed back to central Paris. But as I sat nursed a beer at a bar on the Right Bank, watching Victor Wembanyama’s first basketball game as an Olympian, my thoughts kept straying to Smith, the Australian diver. All sports are unforgiving, Olympic ones even moreso. Perhaps she’ll get a shot at redemption in four years, in Los Angeles; perhaps not. The glamor, the luxury, the Paris of it all—it was all deeply compelling, to be sure, but it was also a backdrop for the undeniably human drama that powers each and every Olympic Games. “I dunno," Smith told reporters after her final dive. "That's diving—trying to control our bodies and spin lots of times on an uneven, very bouncy plank."