Tom Cruise is lowered to the Stade de France during the 2024 Summer Olympics closing ceremony, Sunday, Aug. 11, 2024, in Saint-Denis, France. Photo: AP
The Olympics closing ceremony Sunday (Aug 11, Paris date) revved up as Tom Cruise rappelled from the sky into the middle of the Stade de France field, in France, took the Olympic flag onto a plane, and headed to Los Angeles, the United States, to deliver it to the next host city.
There had been whispers of such an epic handover, and the stunt did not disappoint.
After descending to the Mission: Impossible theme song, Cruise in his Ethan Hunt garb ran through the crowd of athletes gathered on the field, shaking hands and stopping to appear in selfies as he went. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass passed the flag to Simone Biles, who held it while H.E.R. performed the US national anthem, then handed it to Cruise.
Cruise then jumped onto a motorcycle with the flag mounted in back of the seat, and sped away.
The hand-off then cut to a prerecorded video as Cruise zoomed past the Eiffel Tower, rode up a ramp into a plane and then skydived down to the Hollywood sign to the music of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, where he deployed power tools to tweak the Os in “wood” into the Olympic ring insignia.
The athletes took it from there, landing on a Los Angeles beach with the actual Red Hot Chili Peppers, followed by performances featuring Billie Eilish, segueing to Snoop Dogg, who was joined by Dr. Dre. All the US performers were California natives.
While the move had been leaked beforehand as an unparalleled topper to the games, it was right in line with the opening Olympic spectacle.
The ceremony began with a depiction of the Golden Warrior – a character created specifically for this Olympics, also descending from the sky – meeting the winged, headless Goddess of Victory, patterned after the famed Louvre sculpture. That gave way to an intricate ballet portraying the “rediscovery” of the Olympic rings by archaeologists in a dystopian future, as they were unearthed from the stadium floor, then hoisted skyward.
As that unfolded, French tenor Benjamin Bernheim sang the Hymn to Apollo as Swiss pianist and composer Alain Roche accompanied him while suspended vertically, basically playing on his back in midair in a gravity-defying performance.
Back in Paris after Cruise’s segment, French swimmer and multiple gold medalist Leon Merchand delivered the Olympic flame, which he had walked with from Paris’s Tuileries Gardens.
Closing out the ceremony was French singer Yseult singing My Way, a poignant cultural bridge between its origins as the French song Comme D’habitude and its adaptation into English by Paul Anka for Frank Sinatra. – New York Daily News/Tribune News Service
