With the lighting of the Olympic flame, a sigh of relief.
This opening ceremony, a beast so bold as to have taken over the city of Paris almost entirely, is now a memory to cherish rather than a challenge to conquer.
It is difficult to properly convey the scope of this accomplishment and the sacrifices and accommodations made by this city to make it happen. The ambition was to create a truly unique ceremony, something new and inclusive and inspiring.
By that metric, this was a fabulous success.
A story was told as the Olympic flame was delivered through the city, the Eiffel Tower beamed as it never had before, Zinedine Zidane bookended it all and everything seemed to go off without a hitch.
The city of lights danced as one in the rain.
There were drag queens and silver horses and Louis Vuitton suitcases and a mysterious masked figure (which may or not have been Zizou all along?). Lady Gaga thrilled, and Céline Dion was c’est magnifique in closing the show atop la Tour Eiffel.
It was awkward at times, and my goodness was it wet, but by the end you had to step back and marvel at the feat of pulling this whole thing off.
Of course it all came at a cost. There was irony in the motto of these Olympics — Games Open Wide — as the city had very much been slammed shut on ceremony day by an unprecedented peacetime security operation.
There was an armed police officer for every civilian on the streets of Paris, and many of those streets were blocked off entirely. Enough metro stations were shut to almost render the whole thing useless, a situation worsened by the overnight arson attacks on the high-speed rail lines in and out of the city.
The locals, it seemed, had long since cleared out. Anyone who was left was braced for the hours-long battle through security to take up their vantage point along the river or in the Trocadéro.
There is a reason that something like this hasn’t been attempted at an Olympic Games before.