From Tom Cruise to French Touch legends Air and Phoenix, the Stade de France will host a star-studded crowd today for a futuristic closing ceremony that will see Paris hand over the Olympic baton to Los Angeles, host of the next Summer Games in 2028.
The American organisers, who are in charge of part of the show, revealed some of their musical surprises on Sunday. And the line-up is not short of stars: Billie Eilish, HER, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Snoop Dogg have all been announced.
The show, which will take place in one of Europe’s largest stadiums, is intended to be different from the opening that took place along the Seine and which kicked off the Paris Olympic Games in style.
The show will start at 1:00 p.m. (Central Mexico time) surrounded by strict security measures, especially after Taylor Swift’s mega-concerts in Vienna were cancelled, where a jihadist attack plan was defused.
The show was conceived by the same artistic team as the opening, led by Thomas Jolly, whose work celebrating diversity in all forms was widely applauded.
The inauguration, however, also angered conservative and far-right leaders, after which several artists received death threats and online harassment campaigns that are now being investigated by the French justice system.
For this closing show, “absolutely all our freedoms were preserved because this is the country of freedom and creation,” Thomas Jolly said on Friday.
The director of the ceremonies, Thierry Reboul, said that the closing show would be “more universal” and would allow “the race to close in the same spirit as these Olympic Games, on this wave of joy that surrounds us.” The artists will celebrate “the values of sharing, of universality, but also the fragility of the world,” he added.
The show, which will last about 40 minutes, is called “Records” and mixes “wonder” and “dystopia,” a dark genre that describes apocalyptic worlds, Jolly said.
The script tells the story of an interstellar traveler who discovers the vestiges of the Olympic Games in a distant future in which they had disappeared, and sets out to try to re-establish them.
French breakdancer Arthur Cadre will be the guiding thread of this story that will take place in the air, while the giant stages, costumes and lights will take spectators on a journey between the past and the future.
More than a hundred performers, acrobats, dancers and circus artists promised to transform the stadium into a gigantic party hall with a 2,800 m2 stage, where dance, contortions, theatre and urban art influences will be on display.
After an opening that set the bar very high – with Lady Gaga, Aya Nakamura and a stellar appearance by Celine Dion on the Eiffel Tower – the closing ceremony has the complex challenge of maintaining the same level.
Air and Phoenix, French electro legends highly appreciated in the United States, are expected to close Thomas Jolly’s show. Other French-speaking artists are also expected to perform, such as singers Zaho de Sagazan, who was highly acclaimed after her performance at the opening of the Cannes Film Festival, and Yseult.
As is tradition, the organisers of the next Games, the city of Los Angeles, will have fifteen minutes of show time. The American megacity promises to mobilise some of its best-known representatives, such as Tom Cruise, the most daring of Hollywood stars, who filmed part of his most famous chases in Paris.
According to American media, the actor could perform a spectacular number culminating in the passing of the Olympic flag between Paris and Los Angeles, including video sequences filmed on both sides of the Atlantic.
Veteran rapper Snoop Dogg, a special correspondent for NBC and one of the viral stars of these Games, will also perform, as well as Red Hot Chili Peppers, a legendary West Coast rock group from the 90s, and the young singer Billie Eilish, born in LA. Another Californian artist, from the R&B scene, HER, will be in charge of singing the American anthem.
In addition to handing over the Olympic flag to Los Angeles, the ceremony will include other important moments of protocol: the presentation of the last medals, a parade of athletes, the extinguishing of the flame, as well as the proclamation of the closing of the Games by the president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach.
What time is the Closing Ceremony of the Olympic Games?
Unlike the opening of the Games, this time the event will be held in a fixed venue, this will be in the Stade de Francewhich It has a capacity for 80 thousand spectators.
The closing ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games will begin at 10:00 p.m. 1:00 p.m. (Central Mexico time) and according to sources the transmission will begin 15 minutes earlier, which would be at 12:45 p.m.
Source: Ambito
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