Country Breaks Record at Massively Successful Paris Olympics
By Movieguide® Contributor
France is enjoying a majorly successful summer with this year’s Olympic Games, from the star-studded opening ceremonies to breaking medal-count records.
“It’s like a waking dream,” said Tony Estanguet, gold medal-winning French slalom canoeist and member of the Paris 2024 Organizing Committee for the Olympics and Paralympics. “We came a really long way.”
He continued, “I was convinced we could pull it off but this is beyond our hopes. It’s formidable to see French people together, happy, united. There’s such fervor. We give a great image of France and our athletes can feel it.”
The country impressed viewers around the world with its opening ceremonies, featuring performances from Lady Gaga and Celine Dion, who made her triumphant return to the stage following her Stiff Person Syndrome diagnosis. Dion sang Edith Piaf’s “Hymne de l’Amour” (Hymn To Love).
“The star, who last performed live in New York in the spring of 2020, has strong connections with the Olympic games,” Deadline reported. “In 1996, she performed ‘The Power of the Dream’ at the opening ceremony of the Atlanta Olympic games, with the song written and produced specially for the occasion.”
France is also celebrating plenty of wins at this year’s games — so far, Team France has broken its record, winning 44 medals, 12 of which are gold. This is twice as many medals as France took home in Tokyo.
Reuters reported that this bump in medal-wins is due to a seven-year plan France has been working on, involving “promoting excellence in sports clubs and federations and zeroing in on medal hopes, as well as bringing families closer to the action, providing more performance support teams and capitalizing on home advantage.”
“The bet is off to a good start and perhaps even beyond our greatest hopes, but we remain focused on what comes next and are very clear about the difficulty,” Claude Onesta, a former handball coach and the mind behind France’s high-performance sports strategy, explained.
Movieguide® previously reported on the popularity of the Paris Olympics:
Viewership for the Paris Olympics has skyrocketed by over 79% compared to the 2021 Tokyo Games.
On average, a total of 34.5 million people have watched the Olympics over the first three days of competition.
Per NPR, “The showing, driven by cable platforms and the Peacock app, reflects a 79% viewership rise from the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Olympics that took place in 2021, when 19.3 million people were counted by the same metric, according to the network.”
“NBCUniversal’s presentation of the opening Sunday of Paris Olympics competition on NBC, Peacock, and across key NBCU platforms posted a Total Audience Delivery (TAD) of 41.5 million viewers, according to custom fast national data from Nielsen and Adobe Analytics – nearly doubling the opening Sunday of competition for the Tokyo Olympics (21.7 million across all platforms),” NBC reported.
It seems like NBC and Peacock made the right choice by being the sole network to cover the Olympics.
“Led by Peacock, 4.5 billion minutes of Paris Olympics coverage has been streamed through Sunday – surpassing the entire Tokyo Olympics (4.48 billion minutes across NBCUniversal digital platforms),” NBC wrote.
