Paris 2024 - Day 26 (August 11th) - Women's Weightlifting/Closing Ceremonies

Today is the final day of the Olympics! I can’t speak for Sean, but Beth and I are tired and ready to go home. But before that, we’ve got a doubleheader – women’s weightlifting in the morning and the Closing Ceremonies in the evening.

Weightlifting starts at 11:30 AM so we have a leisurely breakfast at our favorite patisserie and then head one more time toward Paris Arena Sud. On the Metro, we have a nice conversation with a woman from England who is going to the same event and is hoping to see one of their athletes win a medal. Today’s event is the women’s superheavyweight division. These are some big women:

All of these women weight at least 97 kg/214 lbs and some of them weight a lot more. You can see from the uniforms that this is another sport where athletes from all over the world can compete. We’ve got athletes from countries as small as Samoa to as large as China. Looking around, there are a lot of fans from China:

That’s because the overwhelming favorite in this contest is Li Wenwen from China. Her best result is nearly 40 kg higher than anyone else in the field. Like all weightlifting events, there are two events in one. The first is the snatch, where you pick up the weight and put it directly over your head in a single motion. The second is the clean and jerk, where you left the weights to shoulder level and then lift it over your head as a second step. If an athlete is successful in at least one of her three attempts in the snatch, then they go on to get three tries at the clean and jerk. Ranking is decided by the sum of the best of the two types of lift.  In the case of a tie, the athlete with the lower body weight wins.

Going into the event, each athlete has selected the initial weight they will try to lift. The contest progresses starting with the lowest weights, and there is a lot of strategy to when athletes will increase their next weight in order to either force a competitor to lift when they aren’t ready or to get a little more rest before trying their next lift. Here are some pictures from the snatch portion:

After the snatch, Li is in first with 136 kg/300 lbs with Park Hyejeong from Korea, Emily Campbell from Great Britain, Lisseth Ayovi Cabezas from Ecuador and Chaidee Duangaksorn from Thailand rounding out the top 5. But my favorite is Naryury Perez Reveron from Columbia. She is the women in the top right of these pictures. I like her because she is the lightest woman in this competition, so she is working at a serious disadvantage. She also likes to yell at the weights to fire herself up before attempting a lift (which is what she is doing in the picture!).

As the clean and jerk start, it is clear that Li is likely to win, Park is probably going to get the silver medal, and Campbell will get the bronze medal. That prediction is confirmed after Lisseth fails in her last clean and jerk at 162 kg and Emily succeeds in her first lift at 162 kg. But both succeed in my book because they both set personal bests. Unfortunately, Naryury was injured making her second clean and jerk and could not continue. Wenwen’s total of 309 kg/681 lbs is well below her best, but she wins the gold medal. Hyejeong’s total of 299 kg is also a personal best and she wins the silver medal. Here are some pictures:

Since this is our last event, we decide to wait for the medal ceremony. There were too many Chinese fans going nuts to get a picture of the podium, but here is a picture of the flags:

The Paris Arena Sud complex has a small Olympic store, so we go inside to see what is available while waiting for the crowd to disperse. Beth gets a t-shirt, but Sean and I don’t find anything that we want. We had decided beforehand that we would find a place around here to eat our main meal of the day. I suggested that we go to the Columbian place that we went to previously, but Sean wants to go to “someplace new” and finds a Peruvian place that is about a 10 min walk away. As we approach the restaurant, we pass a guy in a suit standing next to a limousine. I didn’t think anything more about it until he catches up with me and hands me a plastic tote bag. After we got to our table, I look inside and see a fan, an umbrella, a small bottle of water, a USB drive, a key ring and some literature. All of them contained evangelical religious information. I am ready to just throw it out, but Beth says that she’ll keep the bag temporarily to shlep stuff around.

The food is really good, and the portions are gigantic so we’re happy this is our main meal for the day. I’m surprised that the food is not spicier. Most of the dishes have some combination of potato, corn, tubers, quinoa, beef, pork and chicken. I have something called Ají de Gallina which is a creamy chicken stew served over rice. Yum!

After lunch, we walk back to Paris Arena Sud and there are only a few people around, which means that the Metro station is empty! The trip back to our Airbnb only takes about 15 minutes. Beth and I take the time to begin packing our suitcases even though we have all day tomorrow to get ready for our flight.

The Closing Ceremonies begin at 9 PM so around 6:30 PM, we make our way to the Metro for the longer trip back to Stade de France. There are already quite a few people walking around and the cafés nearby are packed with people that are looking for better, cheaper food than they’ll get at the stadium. The locals are FINALLY starting to get somewhat interested in pins and I make a couple of trades. But it is really the volunteers who are most interested. I come across a group of volunteers who are from all over the world, and they are all interested in pins from their countries, but with one exception, they want me to just give them a pin. I give each of them a pin from my giveaway pocket.

Here is the view from our seats:

We are not sure what to make of the white plastic in front of us, but we do have a great view of the orchestra! There are people from all over the world near us – we see people from Mexico, Canada and Holland just within a row of us as well as many, many locals. Sean and Beth go to get us sandwiches for dinner while I take photos. The orchestra arrives:

I’m still trying to figure out what is going on in the field, now that compressed air is causing the white plastic to balloon up, when Beth and Sean come back with food. The Ceremony starts with a medal ceremony for the women’s marathon which took place this morning. In what is likely the most amazing performance by a woman runner ever, the gold goes to Sifan Hassan from the Netherlands. It is not her winning the marathon that made it amazing, it was the fact that Sifan also medaled in the 10,000 m and 5,000 m races earlier in the Games. Incredible! Tigst Assefa from Ethiopia wins the silver medal and Hellen Obiri from Kenya wins the bronze medal. Shortly afterwards, the athletes begin to arrive:

I’m generally prefer the Opening Ceremonies because it is the beginning and an opportunity for the host city and country to introduce themselves to the world, but while some of the teams are still pretty intact, it is wonderful to see that many of the athletes are mixing with new friends from around the world. Hopefully, their stay in France will change how they view the world. This is the power of the Olympic movement: bringing the world together to compete in peace!

With the athletes in place (or as in place as the people responsible for cat herding can make it), the lights go out and the orchestra starts to play. I don’t pretend to understand half of what I see, but there appears to be some sort of celestial being who brings the idea of the Olympics first to the ancient Greece and later to the rest of the world. This is when we realize that the large white areas in front of us are actually continents. We see groups on each continent come together and begin to build what will end up being Olympic rings. Once built, the rings are raised to the top of the arena. Here are some pictures from this part of the show:

The next section has a bunch of bands. We hear from Phoenix and Air, which we understand are iconic French bands. It is hard to get any good pictures but here is one:

The final part of the performance is Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee declaring the Paris Games closed and calling on the youth of the world to gather in four years in Los Angeles. Then the major of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, hands the Olympic flag to President Bach who then hands it to the major of Los Angeles, Karen Bass. Here is a picture:

The next section is produced by the Los Angeles Olympic committee. Now I’m not a big fan of the “culture” of Southern California, but we get Tom Cruise repelling into the stadium, taking the flag and driving a motorcycle through the streets of Paris to a plane which takes him to Los Angeles. He skydives into the mountains above the city and hands the flag off to local Olympic athletes and they finish on Venice Beach with performances from H.E.R., Billie Eilish and Red Hot Chili Peppers.

No one really wanted to leave after the Ceremonies, so we are stuck in place for a while before the crowd finally starts to leave. This is our fourth time at Stade de France, so we know what to expect – the crush of crowds heading to the RER B station. But we are pleasantly surprised to find that the Metro line 13 station is open to outbound spectators, so the trip home is much quicker than our previous visits.

The high temperature today was 95F with high humidity, so the apartment is really hot when we get back just before midnight. Even with all of the windows open and the fan blowing at the end of the bed, it is a long time before we cool down enough to sleep. Steps for the day: 9,878.