Paris 2024 Olympics day one: swimming, cycling, rowing, hockey and more – live | Paris Olympic Games 2024

Laura Kenny is writing for us during these Games, and she says that she would have won a gold medal in being nervous when she was competing. You can read her column here …

Mihai Chiruță of Romania has won the second heat in the men’s single sculls. The top three in each heat progress to the quarter-finals. Thomas Mackintosh of New Zealand won the first heat.

Dressage has been in focus in the buildup to the Games, especially in Great Britain, for all the wrong reasons. The actual event gets under way this morning at Château de Versailles at 9.30 local time. There are 64 riders and horses competing for spots in the Grand Prix finals, which are next weekend. Germany’s Julia Krajewski rides first on Nickel 21.

Good morning from London, Martin Belam joining you here. The action has begun in earnest with early starts for handball, rowing, shooting and volleyball. Spain’s men are tied 3-3 with Slovenia in the handball, and Germany are stretching out an early 13-8 lead against Japan in the men’s volleyball. Thomas Mackintosh of New Zealand has won the first heat in the men’s single sculls. We are well and truly under way.

Shooting, in case you didn’t know, is being staged in the town of Chateauroux, around three hours drive south of Paris. It’s previous claim to fame was the birthplace of Gerard Depardieu.

We’re just five minutes away from handball, volleyball, rowing and shooting entering the fray. Remember the first medals of the Games are likely to arrive in the 10m Air Rifle Mixed Team two to three hours from now.

These early events are a chance to acclimatise to the Paris 2024 palate. I think the branding of the Games has been magnificent, from the emblem Marianne, through the mascots Les Phryges, to the coat-of-arms pictograms.

I’m not sold on the various shades of purple everywhere though, and the badminton is a case in point with the green court and purple signage a bit muted and underwhelming for my taste.

There’s a healthy crowd in the Porte de la Chapelle Arena for the start of the badminton. The venue, otherwise known as Adidas Arena, is one of the few major builds of the Paris Games.

When it comes to the new buildings, the results are more mixed. The €138m Adidas Arena stands like a shimmering datacentre at the knotted intersection of the Périphérique ring road and the A1 highway at Porte de la Chapelle, on the northern edge of the city centre. Designed by NP2F and SCAU, it is a sleek addition to a neighbourhood once known for its “crack hill” of drug dealers, landing like a streamlined spaceship of urban renewal. It’s an intriguing thing, sharing a similarly knowing faux-industrial language to 6a’s MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. The interior volumes protrude from a raised planted deck, joined by a jaunty wooden A-frame canopy, like a cluster of objects on a table top. A playful semicircular window looks out from the eastern facade, adorning the polished flank with a big smile. The 8,000-seat arena will host Olympic badminton and rhythmic gymnastics, then live on as a concert venue and home for the American-owned Paris Basketball club. Oddly, the official Paris 2024 website boasts that “most of the building materials will be bio-based (principally wood)”, yet the bunker-like edifice is made almost entirely of concrete and clad with energy-intensive aluminium. Did someone spill the bucket of greenwash?

Day one of the Paris 2024 Olympics is under way!

Among the early starters in the badminton is Dorsa Yavarivafa. Born in Tehran, studying Sports and Exercise Science at Middlesex University, and training in Milton Keynes, Yavarifava is representing the Refugee Olympic Team (EOR). She relocated to the UK with her mother at age 15 due to safety concerns. She applied to be a part of the Refugee Athlete Scholarship programme in 2023, and was selected for the Refugee Olympic Team nearly a year later.

Here’s more on the most inspiring team at the Games, with Angelique Chrisafis.

Created in 2015, the Refugee Olympic Team first took part in the 2016 Rio Games, with 10 athletes in three sports. But this year it has grown to 37 athletes, whose countries of origin range from Iran, Syria and Afghanistan to Eritrea and South Sudan, competing in 12 sports including cycling, swimming, taekwondo, judo and breaking. The team is so important for the IOC that the refugee athletes will appear in second position at the Paris opening ceremony, after Greece, carrying the Olympic flag.

We’re now just 15 minutes away from the start of the action on day one of the Paris Olympics. And that action is badminton.

If you don’t know your back alley from your shuttlecock, fear not, because here’s one we made earlier.

It is not out of the question that Australia will leave the Paris Games as the leading nation in the pool. Normally it’s an honour reserved for the USA but the Dolphins have taken a deep squad full of record-breaking talent to France. But will they be swimming in the fast lane? Elsie Grover-Jones takes us to pool school.

The pool is shallower than the 3m standard, at 2.30m and there have been some questions raised over the effect this will have. The starting platforms have fins that allow swimmers to really push off at the gun. And one of France’s faces of the Games, swimmer Léon Marchand, believes it will live up to expectations.

“The pool is superb,” he said. “I loved the feeling I had in the water, the depth which is the same along the entire length. So you feel like you’re swimming fast and that’s cool. It’s a beautiful pool.” If swimmers are feeling fast in the pool at La Défense, we could yet see some new world records.

While the Boomers will naturally commandeer the attention of Australian basketball followers, there is a second nation at the Paris Games that owes a lot to the NBL: South Sudan. Kieran Pender explains why.

South Sudan are very much a second team for Australian fans to cheer on. Four members of the 12-man squad play in Australia’s National Basketball League – Bul Kuol, Jackson Makoi, Majok Deng and Sunday Dech – while a fifth, Kuany Kuany, lived in Australia before relocating to the United States for college. Another Australian, Thon Maker, had a last-minute eligibility appeal rejected after the former Boomers player switched basketball allegiances. Other members of the team play in the NBA, Serbia, China, Israel and Rwanda.

While the US sleeps and Europe awakes, we’ll train our focus for a little while on Australia. There are plenty of Aussies in action on day one, from the Boomers in the morning to Grace Brown in the afternoon, and Ariarne Titmus this evening.

Speaking of Grace Brown, here she is with our own Kieran Pender.

Since the last Olympics, across nine individual time trials, Brown has only finished off the podium once – fourth on stage eight of last year’s Tour de France Femmes. All of which leaves Brown on the precipice of an Olympic medal in late July, when she rolls down the start ramp in cycling’s first event of the Games, just a day after the opening ceremony. Three years of hard work have come to this – a race against the clock around the streets of Paris, across 32.4 km of flat terrain.

In case you wondering, the dreadful weather of the opening ceremony hasn’t lifted. However, the rain is forecast to have cleared by this evening and the rest of the opening week should be much more summery.

The opening ceremony is also an opportunity for the IOC President to make a political statement. Thomas Bach’s can be distilled into “dream with us”. Sean Ingle had the watching brief.

The hope in Bach’s speech? Well that came when he referenced the hope that these Games could be a force for good at a time where the horrific war in Ukraine continues to rage, and the awful images from Israel and Palestine have dominated our screens for the past nine months continue.

If you missed some, or all, of the rain-soaked action, Jon Henley has distilled the spectacle into a handy top-five.

What did you make of the opening ceremony? Brilliant? Kitschy? Hubristic? Barney Ronay’s sketch of the event covers all bases, and ensures that from now on Celine Dion must be referred to as The Canadian Messi.

It was complex, nuanced, fun, energetic, diffuse, diluted, and too spread out. It turns out there’s a good reason why big events are held in stadiums.

At the top of the page you will find links to the day-by-day guide, the medal table, results, and the live schedule. These will be our north stars for the next fortnight, making sure we’re always on top of the action.

And from that day-by-day guide, here’s what Simon Burnton thinks you should be watching today.

Saturday 27 July Day 1

• Shooting
  With a scheduled end of 11.50am local time the 10m mixed team air rifle is expected to pip the women’s synchronised 3m springboard diving by a matter of minutes to be the first gold medal decided in Paris. Whichever wins the race there’s a good chance the anthem played at the end will be the same: the latest world championships in both events were won by Chinese athletes (though they will be hotly contested, and Britain’s Yasmin Harper and Scarlett Mew Jensen claimed world championship silver in the diving last year).

• Men’s rugby
  Antoine Dupont, France’s captain, missed the Six Nations to throw himself into Olympic preparations, declaring a gold medal “the holy grail of the sport, as simple as that”, and organisers have scheduled the men’s final in the hope that he will help them get their Games off to the best possible start. It is far from a done deal, though: France failed to reach the final four in the sport’s two previous Olympic outings, while Fiji have won both golds.

• Men’s handball
  In the past two Olympic finals Denmark beat France (in Rio) and France beat Denmark (in Tokyo). Of the five world championships in the past decade France have won two and Denmark the most recent three, extending their unbeaten run in the event to 28 games by beating France in last year’s final. This year they play on the first day of the men’s tournament, though it would be no surprise if they meet again when the medals are decided on 11 August.

Preamble

Jonathan Howcroft