Paris makes an excellent first impression

The omens at the train station were good. The journey towards a stadium can usually provide a pretty accurate gauge of crowd and atmosphere levels and, stepping off on to the Metro platform with the best part of two hours still to go until the opening athletics session at the Stade de France, the stream of people was already steady.

Paris Olympic

At street level, the fans began to emerge from all directions. Any questions about how invested the Parisian public might be about athletics’ Olympic opening day at the Stade de France looked like receiving a very positive answer.

Once inside the arena, the off-track entertainment was already well underway with the stadium hosts and pre-event music already cranking up the anticipation and noise. A curious introductory video on the large screens that portrayed some of the Olympians of 1900 – the first time the Olympics were staged in Paris – miming along to Highway to Hell by AC/DC provided some light relief and that was followed by a thumping DJ set.

Bob Beamon carried greater weight in more ways than one, however, when he arrived with a large wooden stick to truly get the party started.

Inspired by a French theatre tradition, thumping a “brigadier” on the ground three times has signalled the start of each event at Paris 2024 and the 1968 gold medallist and former long jump record-holder carried his duties out to a tee.

By the time the decathletes were in their blocks to start the day’s action, it had become a bit of a struggle to see empty seats. Yes, much of the crowd would have booked their tickets hoping to roar on Games poster boy Kevin Mayer but, even in the absence of the injured decathlon world record-holder, the watching public provided a key ingredient in getting this Paris 2024 schedule off to a flying start. Not since the World Championships of London 2017 has an Olympic stadium been this full to see a morning session of athletics.

Without Mayer, the crowd searched for anything in a French kit to throw their support behind. With tricolores flying proudly, the growing rumble that turned into a roar for the arrival of combined eventer Mackenson Gletty must have taken his breath away.

This is a stadium more accustomed to football and rugby showpieces, so it can’t have been very often that raucous chants of “Allez Les Bleus” have had to be silenced before a 100m decathlon heat.

Gletty would finish sixth out of seven in that race but a wall of noise followed his every stride. Goodness knows what levels the decibels will reach when a medal is on the line.

There has been much speculation about how quick the distinctive purple track surface might be – and records are expected – so it was perhaps fitting that the first person to cross the line at these Games clocked a PB. Norwegian decathlete Markus Rooth, who ran 10.71 for 100m, will remember that moment.

Such a large audience can mess with athletes’ minds, too. While there are some – such as Josh Kerr, Jakob Ingebrigtsen, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce or Dina Asher-Smith who have been through all of this before – stepping into such a cauldron occasionally throws a race plan off kilter or makes a competitor put their energy into the wrong places.

For track and field athletes, audiences of this size are not the norm but it all forms part of the challenge of negotiating a path through a major championships. The Olympics always just feels bigger and, on the evidence of opening morning, that is true in reality, too.

The thousands upon thousands of spectators who will step off those trains and make a pilgrimage to the purple track over the next few days are in for an absolute treat.

Check out our daily podcast from Paris here…

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