Paris 2024 opening ceremony insulted Christians, Olympic athletes alike
Originally appeared at Townhall.com on August 8, 2024.
Now that we have seen some of the extraordinary achievements of the Olympic athletes, let us again revisit that bizarre opening ceremony that the French put on.
What does it take for a gymnast like Simone Biles or a swimmer like Katie Ledecky to do what they have done?
Answer: It takes an extraordinary amount of work, discipline and self-sacrifice. This is what got every athlete in the Olympics to the pinnacles of their careers.
The opening ceremony glorified the opposite. What was meant to be a creative spectacle of Paris’s emancipation over time, ended up being a wild cacophony of music, pop, metal, electronic from Les Mis to Gojira, which led to what appeared to most people as a drag queen mockery of the Last Supper, capped with a pagan imagery from Greco-Roman mythology with a nearly naked Papa Smurf Dionysus figure.
The image was insulting to billions of Christians worldwide. Many protested — from the Pope in the Vatican, to U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and to leaders of the Russian Orthodox church. It looked deliberate. Even Muslims protested saying that this was insulting to Jesus.
The International Olympic Committee then responded with a non-apology, essentially saying, “sorry that you were offended.” They claimed they “never had any intention to show disrespect to any religious group.” They did not want anything subversive. Thomas Jolly, the creative director who planned the opening ceremony, said this was simply a positive pagan celebration. It was a bacchanal, a wild, orgiastic party with drunken revelry, gluttony, and ritual madness, linked to the gods of Olympus. Dionysus, you’ll recall, was the Greek God of wine, pleasure, festivity, madness and wild frenzy. And Bacchus was the Roman equivalent to Dionysus.
Now let’s accept their explanation for the moment, (which I find very hard to do) that there was no intent to mock the Last Supper and Christians. Let’s imagine for a moment that instead it was a scene depicting Dionysus based on the 17th century Dutch painting “The Feast of the Gods.”
If this is so, then the Olympic committee has deliberately insulted every Olympic athlete who is competing in the games. Because these images are the antithesis of everything that they stand for. It does not represent the spirit of the Olympics, but its exact opposite — all emancipation, no responsibility.
You see, to get to the Olympics, every athlete must spend years of training, hard work, discipline, dedication and self-sacrifice. Simone Biles said she had to train her whole life just to compete for a mere few minutes in the Olympics. For her, that meant 32-34 hours a week. Describing the rigors of gymnastics, she said it is “all sports combined in one — agility, speed, jumping, flipping, memorizing routines, etc.” It is also a year-long sport.
What was the French Olympic Committee thinking?
Here at Colorado Christian University, we train athletes. We tell them that without discipline there can be no victories, no championships and no gold medals. But the message of this Olympics’ opening ceremony was not a message that builds up extraordinary athletes. Their opening message represented freedom “gone to seed,” and wasted. Sadly, it also portrays to the wider world the chaos and decadence of the West. This Olympics’ opening ceremony was not a compelling advertisement for freedom. It did not accurately represent what this festival of games is all about.
It was Aristotle who said, “through discipline comes freedom,” meaning, true freedom is impossible without daily acts of self-discipline where we master our body and thoughts. That is what should have been celebrated.
In gymnastics, when a gymnast’s body and mind get disoriented while flying through the air, they call it “getting the twisties.” This year, the French Olympic Committee not only got the twisties, they fell off the beam! For real inspiration, focus on the athletes instead!