July 27, 2024

Follow along during the day’s action with live coverage from The Athletic.

	By Andrew Keh Reporting from Paris

Trust me when I tell you that it was dry in Paris this week. It was warm. It was sunny. It was maybe a little muggy at times. But it was nice. It was dry.

Then came Friday night, and the skies turned gray, and from those gray skies there fell an hourslong rainstorm that happened to coincide, almost perfectly, with the opening ceremony of these Olympic Games as it unwound spectacularly along the Seine.

It was a bummer, in a way. And yet after the nerve-racking train disruptions that rattled France on Friday morning — the result of a set of coordinated arson attacks — it was a relief to see the ceremony go off without a hitch.

Hundreds of thousands of people got wet, yes. But we saw all the hallmarks of a traditional ceremony — waving athletes, saccharine performances, borderline inscrutable cultural references — while having as a backdrop some of the world’s most breathtaking landmarks, like the Eiffel Tower, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame and the Louvre.

So I’m going to bang my gavel and declare this ambitious, outside-the-box ceremony a success.

I was in the crowd along the Seine, huddled under my umbrella. Most people around me had smiles plastered on their faces. As the sky got darker, and the crowd got wetter, many left to find shelter. But many others ditched their umbrellas and embraced the moment, smiling and shimmying in the rain.

Either way, that is all over now. The city can exhale. Now come the marquee events, and our focus can turn away, finally, from the intricacies of urban crowd management and back over to sports.

The spotlight on Saturday will be on the women’s 400-meter freestyle swimming final, where a showdown is expected among the Australian Ariarne Titmus, the Canadian Summer McIntosh and the American Katie Ledecky, one of the biggest stars of the Games.

But there’s also a gold medal match in rugby sevens, which I saw live for the first time this week and grew quickly enamored with, and a handful of other sports.

We’ll have reporters fanned out all over the place. So stay tuned.

Lingering Questions

The Olympics are a gargantuan event, and it’s natural to have a million questions about them as they begin. Here’s a few you might have been wondering about, with answers from Times journalists:

Why in the world would Paris, or any city, want to go through all this?

Who are all these people The New York Times has in Paris this summer?

Is there seriously an 11-year-old athlete at these Games?

Some of our Olympics coverage — including these dispatches — will also be available in Spanish. You can read them here

Good morning. The Olympics begin this weekend. Here’s to becoming an instant fan for a fortnight.

María Jesús Contreras

Golden opportunity

It has been only three years since the last summer Olympics: the 2020 Tokyo Games, you’ll recall, were held in the summer of 2021. Time has been slippery since the pandemic began, anyway, even without reliable milestones moving around. Three years feels simultaneously like an eternity (think of how much has happened in the last three weeks) and a heartbeat (I’ve been just about to check out this playlist of “frat rock” recommended by Bruce Springsteen … for the past three Julys).

Now the Olympics return with untold opportunities to geek out on sports you haven’t thought about for several years, or ever. This is my favorite promise of the Games: You can pick an event — Canoe slalom? Surfing? Breaking? — and get up to speed in short order on the rules, the athletes, the gossip, the stakes. You can become a superfan instantly.

Broadcast coverage of the Olympics makes this transformation easy. I’m a total sucker for a hyperemotional documentary featurette on that gymnast whose family sacrificed everything for her Olympic dreams. Take my attention and my heart, give me the thrill of sticking the landing and the agony of one tiny wobble on the beam. I’ll admit I haven’t been following the American swimmers that closely since Tokyo, but I’ve spent the past week reading up on Katie Ledecky’s preparation for Paris — she’s “trying to improve her kick” — so I can cheer her on with a fan’s zeal.

I never thought I could get excited about dressage, but after hearing the awe with which my colleague Alex Marshall talked about watching a gelding named Jagerbomb perform a move called a flying change, wherein the horse switches its lead leg in midair, I went straight to YouTube to see it for myself. “One of the strangest things I’ve ever seen an animal do,” Alex had told me, and I concurred. I’ll add that it is also strange and wonderful to see a horse perform such moves to a medley of songs by Tom Jones that includes “Sex Bomb.” Alex wasn’t a fan of dressage before he started reporting on it, but his enthusiasm was enough for me to add it to my roster of Olympic sports I’ll follow with interest.

I’ve tried to become a football fan for the Super Bowl, a basketball fan for March Madness, but there’s always so much lore to catch up on, so much multiseason intrigue I’ve missed that true instant fandom seems out of reach. The Olympics make it easy to get on board. There are so many events and so many teams competing that it would be impossible to be a completist; this density rewards the passionate dilettante and the aficionado alike.

The easiest way to become a fan fast? Ask a die-hard. My colleague Elisabeth Vincentelli played team handball as a child in France, and her knowledge of the sport is a little intimidating. But she gave me some rookie tips for how to get into it: As far as the mechanics of the game, think of it like dry water polo; keep an eye out for powerhouse teams from France and Denmark; watch the ball — players shoot it at the goal at an average of 80 miles per hour; and go to the bathroom before the match begins because the game moves so fast you won’t want to look away for a second.

Related: I spoke with Times reporters about how to become a fan of dressage, handball and artistic swimming. Have a listen.

In Paris. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

The first weekend has a fairly busy schedule. Because of the time difference, events will generally begin before most of the U.S. is awake and run until 4 or 5 p.m. Eastern, with prime-time events, like the swimming finals, taking place in the midafternoon U.S. time. Here’s what to look for (and how to watch):

Saturday

Sunday

More on the Games

Read The Times’s full coverage of the 2024 Paris Games.

Brat Summer

A Kamala Harris meme.  via Aly McCormick

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Art

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Mexican newspaper headlines report the capture of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia. Rodrigo Oropeza/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images