NYT critic reduces Long Beach’s Olympic closing ceremony to a ‘beach party’ — like that's a bad thing?
The 70-year-old critic from Connecticut doesn’t think a beach party featuring Snoop Dogg and other megastars is good enough for the Olympics. I disagree.
The Paris Olympics are over and now all eyes have turned to Los Angeles, which has big shoes to fill in four years when it hosts the Games.
On Sunday, during a closing ceremony celebration that included over a hundred acrobats, dancers and circus artists, the first woman mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, passed the Olympic flag to the first woman mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass.
As is the Hollywood way, “Mission Impossible” star Tom Cruise then leapt from the top of the Stade de France, rappelling to the ground where he took the Olympic flag from the 11-time Olympic medalist Simon Biles, attached it to a motorcycle and rode out of the stadium.
This is the MOST Tom Cruise that Tom Cruise has ever Tom Cruised. pic.twitter.com/r5ho9xaVsd
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) August 12, 2024
Then, in a prerecorded clip, Cruise rode the bike through Paris and onto a plane, which he later jumps out of above LA. Cruise made his way up to the Hollywood sign (modified, of course, to include the Olympic rings), where he passed the flag off to a series of past and present U.S. Olympians, who carried it through the streets of LA until it reached its final destination: Long Beach.
