Organizers of the Paris Games on Monday approved a plan to hold the opening ceremony of the 2024 Summer Games in the middle of the city instead of in a stadium, an unusual and symbolic shift to openness and accessibility after what is likely to be two consecutive Olympics largely closed to the public.
Paris 2024, the organizing committee for the next Summer Games, said it planned to send more than 10,000 Olympians down the Seine in a parade of some 160 boats instead of having a traditional march into the Olympic Stadium. The journey would end at the Eiffel Tower, and the celebration would occur in a plaza across the river from the landmark.
"We wanted to imagine a new way and a new model,” Tony Estanguet, the three-time Olympic gold medalist in canoe slalom who leads the Paris organizing effort, said in an interview ahead of the announcement. "For France, it was so important for the future of the Games to have this model.”