Nearly 48 hours after it took place, the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games is not done attracting comments. Between the emotion provoked by the visual dazzle instantly inscribed in the country's collective memory and the frustration created by a production visibly disoriented by the profusion of events, viewers around the world didn't quite catch the show conceived by director Thomas Jolly with historian Patrick Boucheron, historian Leïla Slimani, screenwriter Fanny Herrero and playwright Damien Gabriac. In France, 23.4 million people watched television channel France 2 on Friday, July 26, between 7:30 and 11:30 pm, representing 83.3% of audience share.
"Well, on the Moroccan channel, we've been seeing a photo of the Louvre for the last 15 minutes, so I deduce that someone got naked," posted teacher and author Rachid Zerrouki, who goes by Rachid l'Instit on X, at 10:08 pm on Friday. According to sports daily L'Equipe, the Moroccan channels of the public broadcasting group SERT made sure that the naked body of singer and actor Philippe Katerine, painted blue and girded with a garland of flowers concealing his private parts, escaped its viewers.
NBC followed suit. "If a viewer wanted to see the entire ceremony," the American broadcaster told the L'Equipe, "they could watch the OBS-produced signal on Peacock, the streaming platform for the Olympics in the United States." The Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) is a subsidiary of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Channels around the world use the images and sounds they broadcast.
If the countless reactions at the sight of Katerine lying across a plate of victuals on the stage of the Passerelle Debilly are anything to go by, even in France, not everyone seemed to be witnessing the same ceremony. In Le Journal du Dimanche, former French MP Philippe de Villiers, from Vendée as Katerine, but an ultraconservative Catholic, described the show as "a pastiche of the Last Supper, with drag queens feasting around a Christ-like eucharist – a woke Jesus – which profanes the famous painting The Last Supper [of Christ, painted by Leonardo da Vinci], the founder of a civilization." The show "was extremely disrespectful to Christians," wrote Elon Musk, the owner of the X network, on Friday evening.
"What an honor for me! I was over the moon when I was told," Katerine quipped on radio station France Inter on July 27. "To tell the truth, if there wasn't any controversy, it wouldn't be funny," he reacted a few hours earlier on BFMTV. "If everyone agreed and had the same opinion, what a bore on this earth! That would be another [form of] fascism."
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