Using the Seine for a boat parade of athletes instead of the traditional stadium walk was a bold decision, but also likely a decision informed by now-ubiquitous security considerations. This is the first modern summer games to break with that convention.

But it was a decision that also offered a different narrative path that took the TV audience on an aerial tour of Paris, one of the world’s truly extraordinary cities, with pauses in unexpected and delightful corners of the French capital, and French national identity.

Accenting it with a visit to the Louvre, to showcase France’s world-leading collection of art, Axelle Saint-Cirel’s stunning retool of The Marseillaise, the haunting tones of Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre and a RuPaul-adjacent Olympic fashion show for the ages, it all became so much greater than the sum of its many moving parts.

Some of it was breathtaking. Some of it was moving. Some of it, such as the “dance representing the turmoils of the evils in the world”, felt wholly Gen Z. And some of it, including a drag-themed recreation of Giovanni Bellini’s painting The Feast of the Gods, initially mistaken as a take on Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, felt both provocative and camp.

And then there was a final half-hour of the torch relay that seemed to take longer than the 1631-and-a-half hours of the torch relay that preceded it.

Inevitably, however, the emotional touchstones are simple: the hopeful smiles and giddy excitement of the world’s best athletes on the eve of a brutal competition in which each of them dreams of draping themselves in glory, and their national flag, on the medal podium.

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So the television pictures, from the dancers and the stunning performances from Lady Gaga and Celine Dion, become a sort of colourful window dressing for the human story of grit, endurance and excellence, which is beginning to unfurl itself on the world stage, even if they did have to battle the elements on a wet Paris evening.

As the French say, après la pluie, le beau temps. After the rain, comes the good weather.