But what a closing ceremony is mainly about is handing on the Olympic baton to the next host. You wonder what they might do in Los Angeles in four years time to match all this. It will be their third Games. The last was in 1984 when the opening ceremony involved a bloke in a rocket pack and the closing one featured Lionel Ritchie doing an extended version of his hit All Night Long which indeed went on all night long.
They will, though, have to go some way to match what Paris offered. Everything here worked. Not least, the public transport. The new metro station at St Denis opened in June and, through these Games has whisked thousands quickly and efficiently from the Stade de France. It was like that across the city. In LA the closest they have to an integrated public transport system is Uber. More to the point, the city has none of the landmarks that have been used to such effect by Paris; there is very little in its architecture that even the most enthusiastic BBC reporter would describe as “iconic.”
So what will they offer? From their contribution to the closing ceremony we can only suspect scale. And bombast. Not to mention Tom Cruise abseiling from the stadium roof to snaffle the Olympic flag and take it westwards. Everything that happened thereafter was in a filmed sequence projected on the stadium screens. It included him doing some pointless parachuting, then tearing past the Hollywood sign with three added Os to mirror the Olympic rings. It all ended up with a performance from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers.
