Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony: A New Twist on Old Traditions

The Olympic Games are one of the most important traditions that have existed since ancient times. They are a celebration of sport, history, and art and, more generally, of ancient Greek culture and its ideals, which greatly influenced our cultural development. 

The art and history involved in this ancient tradition are still evident in its modern-day iteration. Read on to discover the origins of the ancient Olympic Games and the elements involved in their celebrations so that you can better understand and appreciate all that went into play during the 2024 Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony.

The Olympic Games originated in ancient Greece, with most historians agreeing that 776 BCE was the first registered year the competitions were held. In ancient times, the games were imbued with religious meaning, as they were held in honor of the Greek god Zeus. The original place where the games were held was the Panhellenic Sanctuary in Olympia, as Mount Olympus was the mountain where the gods lived and from where Zeus ruled. 

The games were a significant event for all the Greeks, as they were extremely important to athletes, sports lovers, and pilgrims alike. Every four years, the games were an opportunity for participants to commune with the gods and curry favor. The participants’ physical feats were viewed as demonstrations that pleased the gods, as impressive physical performances played an important role in Greek mythology. 

A Short History of the Ancient Olympic Games

As mentioned above, the games had a prominent religious aspect to them. They were one of the two most important religious rituals in ancient Greece, with the other being the Eleusinian Mysteries. It’s worth mentioning that the area around the Mediterranean Sea had a predilection towards sports events since prehistory, as seen in Mycenaeans adopting Minoan games during religious or funerary processions. Homer mentions a number of heroes who joined such competitions to honor the departed. It was only around 700 BCE that the Olympic Games began being associated with the gods and less with the dead.

The Olympic Games originated in the power struggle between several ancient Greek groups over the control of the religious sanctuary at Olympia. The games were a way to win political and social influence over the sanctuary. Until the Roman conquest of Greece, the Olympics were reserved for Greek-born individuals only, while the Romans expanded the criteria to Greek-speaking individuals to allow more athletes to join.

The most infamous games were the Neronian Olympiad, held by Nero. The Roman emperor bribed the judges in order for him to win the chariot and music contests. After his death, the Olympiad was declared void by the judges, who apologized and returned the bribes.

If we wish to compare the contemporary Olympic festivities, we need to take a look at the ancient festivities, as the ancient Olympics were quite different from what we might imagine today. The celebrations had a powerful mystic element to them, and the ceremony reflected that.

In general, Olympic festivities would begin with all the participants gathering in the nearby town, Elis, and they would usually arrive there a few months in advance. They would have been trained by Hellanodikai, who supervised the Games. On the first day of the Olympics, the athletes and their entourage would start marching towards Olympia, a journey that took a full day. At the entrance of Olympia, they would stop at the Pierian spring, where the Hellanodikai would sacrifice a boar and then sprinkle the blood on the participants. They would wash in the spring afterward to purify themselves.

Once in Olympia, the athletes would be separated from their entourage and taken into the Bouleuterion, a type of council house, where they were classified by age and sworn in before Zeus. The oath would prevent them from engaging in evil acts during the Olympics. The last step of the festivities would be the athletes being taken to the altars, where they’d make a sacrifice to either Zeus, Apollo, Hermes, or Hercules. The Games would then begin while bustling with merchants, thinkers, politicians, artists, sculptors, and musicians who all tried to promote ideas and works.

The Heritage of the Olympic Games Today

While the modern Olympic Games are no longer overtly religious, they still remain one of the most important and most awaited events globally. The games’ popularity goes beyond the Greek-speaking world nowadays and is not an event that is exclusive to the Mediterranean basin. Just as in ancient times, the modern Olympics combine artists’ manifestations and abstract ideas with practical bodily movement in the form of sports. Every four years, countries compete for the prestige of being the next host of the Olympic Games, a role that confers reverence and influence.

Each host country offers its own tribute to the history of the Olympic Games through organized festivities, such as the opening and closing ceremonies. These festivities are an opportunity to meditate on how Greek influences can be found in the host country’s history, art, and culture. In this way, many Olympic events and ceremonies use art history not only to show Ancient Greece’s influence on the country but also to make references to its own national history.

The opening ceremony for the 2024 Paris Summer Olympic Games featured several elements that were a direct tribute to ancient Greek culture. For example, one of the most popular (and most notorious) parts of the Paris ceremony was the recreation of a painting of Greek gods.

Dionysus (with his Roman equivalent being Bacchus)—the god of wine, orchards and fruits, festivity, fertility, insanity, and ritualistic madness—took center stage. The association between Dionysus and fruits explains the appearance of the blue-skinned individual on a plate near lots of fruits and vegetables. His outfit consists of a grape wreath on his head and around his genitalia, the latter being an alteration of the heroic nude, which is how Dionysus is usually represented in art.

The Dionysus scene can thus be seen as a festivity of gods, therefore being much in line with the original meaning of the ancient Olympic Games, where it was believed that mortals celebrated the games together with the gods.

Another point of ancient Greek visual tribute is the vibrant colors in the scene. All the gods, most wearing drag-queen style garb with ancient elements, are very colorful and sparkling, to the point where some could label it as kitsch. The colorfulness in such a scene is a direct tribute to the fact that ancient Greek sculptures and buildings were all painted in bright colors, as archeology shows us.

The Paris Opening Ceremony as a Tableau Vivant

The recreation of Dionysus and the gods is not only a direct nod to ancient Greek culture and the ancient Olympic Games but also harkens back to a traditional French practice: the tableau vivant.

The act of staging a scene with mostly static individuals posed with elaborate costumes in a theatrical setting is the basic definition of a tableau vivant, translated literally to “living picture.” The tradition of the “living picture” originates in the medieval period, when Christian mass included dramatic scenes and such stagings. Besides this, the history of art is deeply tied to the symbolic, where arranged compositions with specific poses and costumes offer meaning to the viewer beyond what’s directly shown.

From this perspective, one of the main acts of the 2024 Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony can be seen as paying tribute to the historical tradition of the tableau vivant with its careful elaboration and staging of the Olympic deities having a feast. This interpretation is strengthened by the stillness of the actors, with their static and imposing poses that mimic the grandeur of mythological baroque paintings or Greek tragedies.

A plausible inspiration for the Paris ceremony comes from the Magnin Museum in Dijon. The Feast of the Gods by Jan Harmensz van Bijert may have informed the Dionysus feast scene in the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. The painting demonstrates the artist’s connection to the Utrecht Caravaggisti and employs the very popular chiaroscuro technique, which brings dramatic Baroque lighting to the painting. Despite its originally Dutch provenance, the painting has been housed in France for quite some time, emphasizing both the 17th-century appreciation for antiquity and the French collectors’ interest in Greek mythology paintings.

Other sources of inspiration for the Dionysus feast can be found in the many mythological paintings housed in the most popular French museum, the Louvre, which boasts an impressive collection with ancient Greek themes.

Besides the Greek inspirations, the ceremony was filled with historical references to the history of France, with figures identified as Joan of Arc or Goddess Sequana, a grand display with a headless Marie Antoinette to symbolize the French Revolution or hints of the country’s rich artistic history of cabaret. The ceremony of the 2024 Games was rich and complex in visual elements that required the viewer to appeal to art and history to decipher their meaning. Despite this, the ceremony was a good reflection of French culture and its complex history. 

In sum, the Olympic Games are an ancient Greek tradition with a rich cultural heritage that is still honored to this day. Moreover, the ancient Games had a focus on religion and mysticism, a focus that is not present today. Instead, the contemporary Games preserve the ideals of peace, kinship, comradery, and fair play. These ideals were introduced by the ancient tradition and coincide with the general ideals transmitted by ancient Greek culture through theories of morals, politics, and philosophy. As shown, the Paris Olympics preserved some of this spirit and heritage through visual elements present in the opening ceremony. Moreover, these ancient Greek elements were combined with events from the history of France to create a narrative that highlights the heritage of French culture.