PARIS — Plans to stage the opening ceremonies for the 2024 Olympics on the Seine River — the first-ever held outside a stadium — may conjure memories of similar plans to hold a floating opening ceremony for a major event in Victoria three decades ago.
The original concept for the 1994 Victoria Commonwealth Games, inspired by the first Symphony Splash in 1989, called for the opening ceremony to be held in the Inner Harbour on floating barges with bleachers facing the Empress Hotel and the legislature buildings.
It didn’t happen for a number of reasons, from logistics to budget, as the Victoria Games were staged for a now almost-quaint-sounding $162 million. The budget for the 2024 Paris Summer Olympic Games is estimated at $10 billion US.
In the end, the Victoria Games opening ceremony was held at Centennial Stadium on the University of Victoria campus before a crowd of 35,000, including Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip.
“The floating stadium in the Inner Harbour made a lot of sense and was very much do-able. But it was low-hanging fruit to be picked off in terms of cost savings,” said Terry Williams, senior architect for the floating-stadium plans.
Still, many on the Island with long memories will watch wistfully Friday as Paris’ ambitious opening plays out, wondering what could have been.
“It caught people’s imaginations at the time,” said Williams. “It would have been fabulous for Victoria, which I have always envisioned as the Prague of the Pacific. I will watch with interest how Paris uses the Seine for its opening ceremony Friday.”
With the 30th anniversary of the 1994 Victoria Games set to be celebrated next month, the story of the floating ceremony that didn’t happen still reverberates.
Williams, who was also senior architect of Centennial Stadium’s temporary expansion for the Games, has been a proponent over the years of making better use of the Inner Harbour, particularly Ship Point.
Chris Gower, who was junior architect for the Victoria Inner Harbour opening-ceremony concept under Williams, and later worked on the Centennial Stadium temporary expansion for the Games, said while the floating ceremony never happened in Victoria, it “showed we don’t think like a provincial backwater.”
“An idea that little ol’ Victoria came up with three decades ago will be done, in its own way, by Paris,” Gower said.
The Paris Olympics opening ceremony (10 a.m. PT Friday on CBC) will feature a six-kilometre flotilla of athletes and performers on the Seine River passing under historic bridges and by many of the city’s iconic structures, such as Notre Dame Cathedral and The Louvre Museum.
The original plans for a free and open ceremony, watched by two to three million people on the banks of the river, have been scaled back to 250,000 ticketed spectators due to security concerns.
Further affecting preparations is the weather, which will be hot, but with a 60 per cent chance of rain.
Victoria can certainly tell Paris a thing or two about best-laid plans.
>>> To comment on this article, write a letter to the editor: [email protected]
