PARIS – Christopher Blevins will be all dressed up, but he won’t go.
The Opening Ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympics will be like no other. An estimated 10,000 athletes and another 3,000 dancers will float down the Seine River on boats in an open-air celebration. It is expected to be experienced firsthand by at least 300,000 spectators – four times as many as typically attend the official opening of a Summer Games.
But Blevins won’t be there in person, not on a boat nor on the riverbank. Instead, the Durango native and the rest of the USA mountain biking team will watch the roughly four-hour affair on a TV in a common room of their hotel, just a half-hour drive from downtown Paris and all the action.
“It’s a pretty exhausting thing,” Blevins said Thursday, on the eve of the ceremony. “But we’ve got a good USA Cycling team hotel here away from the village. There’s a big TV downstairs in the conference room, so I think we’ll all be wearing our Opening Ceremony outfits, those that have them, and watch it together.”
Blevins and women’s team racer Haley Batten also missed out on the Opening Ceremony for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics three years ago. Blevins, who finished 14th at those Games, said he hasn’t given much thought to his decision to skip the event even given its historic nature.
First-time Olympians Savilia Blunk and Riley Amos also will sit this one out. Blunk said the process of getting to the parade, much less being in it, sounded too exhausting.
“You’re on your feet for like 18 hours. You have to leave the (Athlete) Village at like 4 a.m.,” she said. “At the Olympics I want to have the best race I possibly can. So I’m going to focus on that performance. And then after my race I will spend a few days in the athletes village.”
The entire USA Cycling contingent is staying at a hotel near Élancourt Hill, the human-made park where the mountain biking races will be held. Though they won’t get the true Athlete Village experience – including the cardboard beds – until after they finish racing, the athletes said USA Cycling has done a good job incorporating the Olympic into the decorations.
Alec Pasqualina, the mountain bike director at USA Cycling, said athletes were given the option to attend the Opening Ceremony. However, he noted that the reasons not to, include more than just fear of fatigue.
“We always honor that individuality that’s a unique aspect of our sport,” Pasqualina said. “But there are a lot of logistics involved, etc., and security threats. I think it wasn’t much of a decision for them, to be honest.”
When they ride
The women’s mountain bike race begins at 6:10 a.m. MST Sunday and the men’s mountain bike race begins at 6:10 a.m. MST Monday.
Team USA’s athletes aren’t in Paris for the sightseeing, Pasqualina added, they’re here on a business trip. An American mountain biker hasn’t won an Olympic medal since Georgia Gould in 2012, and they’ve never taken more than bronze. This group, he believes, could end that drought.
“You talk about metal contention, that’s not something that the athletes take lightly,” he said. “You know, you could have a great opportunity to experience a lot of things, but the athletes aren’t here for that. And it’s 100% them focusing and being 100% committed to their craft, their careers, and it’s not really much of a conversation that we really had at all.”
The Opening Ceremony is an iconic Olympic moment, though, and Blevins said someday he would like to have a place to wear his team-issued button-down shirt and jacket other than the hotel lounge. He’s keeping July 2028 open on his planner.
“Hopefully I’m in L.A. and maybe that’s the one I can make it there for,” he said. “But you’re focused on doing your best (at the moment) and hopefully I’ll be able to have some fun afterward.”
Julie Jag is a former sports reporter for The Durango Herald and now works at the Salt Lake Tribune. She is covering the Summer Olympics from Paris.
