The Paralympic opening ceremony is on Wednesday 28 August 2024.
The opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games will take place on Wednesday, 28 August. Here’s how to watch it around the world.
How to Watch The Paralympics Opening Ceremony Live
For the Olympics opening ceremony, Paris took the action outside of the stadium for the first time ever—something that will be repeated for the Paralympics, too. Once again, it will be orchestrated by Thomas Jolly, the Artistic Director for the Ceremonies, but the choreography and staging are under the guidance of Swedish choreographer Alexander Ekman.
Ekman made his name for his version of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake in Oslo in 2016 when he recreated a lake and filled it with 6,000 liters of water. Ekman will use dancers with disabilities.
The opening ceremony will be on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées and Place de la Concorde, the largest square in Paris and just a short distance from the Assemblée Nationale and Le Grand Palais. 4,400 Paralympic athletes, 240 from France, will parade on the Champs-Élysées.
The first part will be free for the public to watch live, and the final ceremonial and artistic part will be at Place de la Concorde, on a 4,500-square-meter stage surrounded by four tiers of seating. Prices range from €150 to €700, and tickets are available on the official ticketing website.
In the end, the Olympic cauldron will once again be lit until it is extinguished at the closing ceremony for the final time, and the whole process will start again in Los Angeles in 2028.
How to Watch The Paralympics Opening Ceremony On Screens
There will be an opportunity to watch the ceremonies as well as many Paralympic events on giant screens in the fan zones across Paris, as there was during the Olympic Games.
For anyone outside Paris, it’s possible to watch on television. There’s a list of the rights holders of the Olympics and Paralympics, on which you can find out who will be televising the events worldwide. For instance, the Paralympics opening ceremony in France will be screened on free-to-air channel France 2 from 8 pm on Wednesday, 28 August.
In the U.S., NBC Universal has the broadcast rights, and it will be shown on USA Network and Peacock. A complete list of broadcast coverage can be found here. In the U.S., there will be a special one-hour pre-show at 1 pm E.T., followed by the Opening Ceremony immediately afterwards at 2 pm EST. The ceremony will last around three hours.
NBCU’s Paralympic Games coverage will involve more streaming hours than any other Paralympic event. For the 12-day event, there will be about 1,500 live hours of coverage on Peacock and more than 140 hours of Paris Paralympic television coverage across NBC, USA Network, and CNBC.
The schedule for the entire Games can be found here, in English and in Paris time.
The closing ceremony is on Sunday, 8 September, and in France, it will be aired on France 2 from 8:30 pm onwards. Artists are expected to be involved, but no names have yet been announced for the Paralympic opening or closing ceremonies.
