PARIS – The Canadian team, including several Island athletes, will literally go with the flow today in the floating opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games on the Seine (10:30 a.m. PT).
When triathlete Simon Whitfield of Victoria carried the Canadian flag into the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, it was into a standard stadium with the standard crowd in attendance. Nobody could have imagined then that University of Victoria Vikes rugby great Nathan Hirayama would carry the Canadian flag into a hauntingly empty stadium in Tokyo during the opening ceremony of the pandemic one-year delayed 2020 Olympics. What a difference three years makes as Olympic gold-medallists, sprinter Andre De Grasse and weightlifter Maude Charron, will be co-flag bearers for Canada today before a crowd of 250,000 lining the banks of the Seine. It would have been between two to three million people along the river watching but those plans were cut back due to security concerns. But it still looks to be spectacular, even with rain threatening.
“Tokyo was so different. Paris will be huge,” said Charron.
Charron quipped it’s lucky they will be on boats or she may not have been able to keep up with De Grasse on a track in a regular opening ceremony. Both used the “going with the flow” line in the Canadian Olympic Committee press conference to announce the flag-bearers.
“I am nervous and really don’t know what to expect or even what kind of boat it’s going to be,” said De Grasse, Canada’s winningest male Summer Olympian with six medals.
“I’m just going to embrace it and go with the flow.”
The opportunity isn’t lost on him: “It’s going to be a big moment that I will remember the rest of my life. Watching as a kid, I never dreamed of going to the Olympics. But I became not only an Olympian but a flag-bearer. It’s incredible.”
Competitions have already begun, and others are set to this weekend, such as rugby sevens with the Langford-based Canadian women’s team, rowing with the Duncan-based Canadian team and Canada’s Golden NBA Generation making the first appearance by this nation in men’s hoops since captain Steve Nash of Victoria in 2000 at Sydney and beginning its quest for the nation’s first Olympic medal in basketball since Victoria players Doug Peden and Art and Chuck Chapman captured silver at Berlin in 1936. Tofino’s Sanoa Dempfle-Olin also starts this weekend, not that she is anywhere near the opening ceremony in Paris, with Olympic surfing taking place on the other side of the world in Teahupo’o, Tahiti, in what is rather charmingly referred to as Greater France.
All that means only about 100 of the 338 Canadian athletes will take part in the opening ceremony today and almost all of them will be athletes competing in the second week of the Games. Even that is not a guarantee of being in the opening.
“We don’t land in Paris until Monday,” said cyclist Erin Attwell of Victoria, whose team pursuit event is not until the second week of the Games.
“So we will be watching the opening ceremony from our TV screens like everybody else. We’ll get to take part in the closing ceremony, hopefully with medals around our necks.”
Olympians will usually take part in one of the two ceremonies. The opening and closing ceremonies are crucial statement moments that anchor each end of the Olympics. Without them, said Games founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin, it would be just a series of world championships strung together over two weeks.
The Olympics were in a bad place after much of the world boycotted the 1980 Moscow Summer Games over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But then a movie came along the next year, 1981 Academy Award Best Picture winner Chariots of Fire about the 1924 Paris Olympics with an electrifying soundtrack by Vangelis, which re-kindled interest in the Games. Now 100 years after those last Paris Olympics, the City of Lights plans to re-ignite the imagination.
