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Olympics Opening Ceremony Review: Paris’ Lengthy Spectacle On The Seine Lost In Translation On The Small Screen
Taking the opening ceremony out of a stadium, the City of Lights effort didn't quite match its grande ambitions
Followed by legends like Serena Williams, NadiaComăneci, Carl Lewis and Rafael Nadal, that final evocative display on the tower that engineer Gustave Eiffel started in 1887 wouldn’t have been out of place at the conclusion of any stadium rock show of the past 20 years. Essentially, an overripe tourism ad for the City of Lights, the cliché addled lengthy Opening Ceremony was full of shopping hot spots, fashion show red carpets, some tunes from Les Misérables, an unintentional homage to Frozen 2, and the bells of the partially rebuilt cathedral. Put together against a constant backdrop of political chaos in the Fifth Republic and launching mere hours after a clearly coordinated attack crippled much of France’s rail system, the start of the $10 billion Games of the XXXIII Olympiad took the event outside a stadium for the first time.
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