Australians voice anger over Olympics opening ceremony
The Olympics opening ceremony in Paris has left many Australians frustrated, fearing they had missed the Aussie team’s grand arrival.
Proceedings started at 7.30pm local time (3.30 Saturday AEST) and were set to last three hours with athletes of the world parading in barges for six kilometres along the River Seine.
Hundreds of thousands of people, including 320,000 paying and invited ticket-holders, lined the Seine’s banks while three billion viewers were set to tune in around the world.
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But rain and cold weather meant the whole event lacked atmosphere and many Aussie sports fans struggled to understand why the Channel Nine coverage didn’t feature the green and gold team early on as countries joined the parade in alphabetical order.
When Bahrain was shown before Australia, viewers took to social media thinking Australia had been locked out of the coverage.
But as the host of Brisbane 2032, Australia was third last in the order of nations, ahead of only the United States (hosts of Los Angeles 2028) and France.
However, that wasn’t made clear and when Lady Gaga appeared on screen, many thought the athletes had been left out altogether.
“I’m watching the opening ceremony and Cambodia are floating down the river at the moment but I haven’t seen Team Australia. Where the hell are they? Or have I somehow just missed it?” one viewer wrote on X.
“Have we been banned?” said another.
“What is actually going on right now?” queried one sports fan
“Did I miss the #Australia boat or did that part clash with the entertainment?’ another disgruntled viewer asked.
Eventually the Australian team did appear and seemed to be having a wonderful time.
The opening ceremony was a very different affair from other years.
Every bridge along the parade route featured dancers while Lady Gaga and Celine Dion were the star performers.
But the first ever opening ceremony to be staged outside a stadium hasn’t been without challenges, with security a major issue as arsonists attacked train lines.
Hours before the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, part of France’s high-speed rail network was paralysed by a “massive attack” that disrupted service for hundreds of thousands of passengers, officials said.
Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said the country’s intelligence services and law enforcement agencies had been mobilised to track down suspects as he warned in a post on X that “the consequences for the rail network are massive and serious.”
French president Emmanuel Macron admitted the plan for the river ceremony was very ambitious.
“At the beginning, it seemed to be a crazy and not very serious idea,” Macron said this week.
“But we decided it was the right moment to deliver this crazy idea and make it real.”
