After 19 days of competition, Sunday marks the end of the 2024 Paris Olympics. And like the July 27 opening ceremonies, today’s closing ceremonies are expected to be a combination of sports and spectacle—but with a California twist, as the event will also serve as a handoff for the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028.
The Paris Olympics conclude on Sunday, August 11 after 329 events across 32 sports, four of which are considered “non-traditional”: skateboarding, sport climbing, surfing, and breaking, the last of which made its Olympic debut this year. Over 10,500 athletes across over 200 countries, as well as the IOC Refugee Olympic Team, competed over the past weeks, the event’s website notes. That amounted to about 350,000 hours of broadcast TV around the world, watched by billions of people.
Add to that Sunday’s closing ceremonies, which begin at 3 p.m. ET. In the U.S., viewers can watch the end-of-games event on NBC and Peacock. While the exact details of the final ceremony are kept under wraps, here’s what we know so far:
Thomas Jolly, the Games’ 2024 artistic director behind the controversial opening ceremony drag queen tableaux that so distressed certain delicate commentators will stage the event, called “Records,” at the Stade de France, an 80,698-seat venue just north of Paris. Per the Olympics website, the event will feature “over a hundred performers, acrobats, dancers and circus artists,” and “an original soundtrack, new interpretations, musical performances and the participation of world-renowned singers will complete the picture.”
“Part of the show will take place in the air,” organizers promise, “while the giant sets, costumes, and spectacular lighting effects will take spectators on a journey through time, both past and future.”
According to the Guardian, what we see today might have been altered in the days leading up to the event. Ceremonies director Thierry Reboul tells the outlet that the backlash to the supposed boundary-pushing at the opening ceremonies “forced us to have to reread the entire [closing ceremonies] for the umpteenth time to be sure that there is no possible misinterpretation, that we are not made to say what we do not want to say.”