By JONATHAN LANDRUM Jr., Associated Press

PARIS (AP) — The Paris Olympics’ opening ceremony got underway after a rough start to the Summer Games on Friday, with rainy skies over the Seine and suspected acts of sabotage targeting France’s flagship high-speed rail network.

ZIZOU’S FLAME

Former French footballer Zinedine Zidane is seen on a screen prior to the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 on July 26, 2024 in Paris, France. (Photo by Alex Davidson/Getty Images)

French soccer legend Zinedine Zidane kicked off the opening ceremony with the Olympic flame in his hands. In a prerecorded video, he’s seen running and weaving through a Parisian traffic jam before he delivers the flame to a group of children on the metro who then make their way through the Catacombs and to a boat, at which point the broadcast switched to a real-time view of the Seine River.

LADY GAGA DAZZLES

Lady Gaga delivered a dazzling performance as the first musical act during the Paris Olympics 2024 opening ceremony — except it was all prerecorded. The Grammy- and Oscar-winning performer kicked off her performance on steps along the Seine River, singing Zizi Jeanmaire’s “Mon Truc en Plumes.” Gaga’s appearance was a surprise — she was not listed on a program provided to the media in advance — but was heavily rumored after the singer and actor was spotted in Paris.

By PAUL NEWBERRY, AP National Writer

NANTERRE, France (AP) — The main swimming pool for the Paris Olympics is set up inside a 30,000-seat rugby stadium on the city’s western edge.

Sound strange?

Not really. It’s the new norm.

The biggest swim meets are being held in massive venues, which could provide a boost to the sport’s popularity in non-Olympic years.

“I love the idea of more and more people watching swimming,” said Australian star Bronte Campbell, who will be competing in her fourth Summer Games. “The bigger the crowds, the better. Maybe they’ll make enough noise that we can finally hear them underwater.”

The U.S. Olympic trials were held this year at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, a 63,000-seat venue that is normally the home of the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts.

The event broke numerous attendance records, drawing 285,202 fans over nine days — including 22,209 for one session.

“I think it was great,” American Nic Fink said. “It was a big swing from USA Swimming to try to host an even like that in Lucas Oil. From my standpoint, it seemed like it was a success in that viewership was up, tickets were good.”

Just as important, it was a meet that appeared to grow the sport beyond its hard-core fan base.

“It seemed like it was a great environment for not only the swimmers and swim fans, who want to go see the best swimming, but also for the casual fans who are like, ‘Oh, the Olympic trials are here, let’s go see what that’s about,’” Fink said.

“I was going into it kind of anticipating it being like a circus, and it was in that regard. But it seemed like a lot of fun. too,” he added. “I think that’s a good introduction and stepping stone to maybe the future of swimming.”

Paris built a new 6,000-seat aquatics center for these Games, but it will be used only for diving, artistic swimming and water polo preliminary games.

The swimming will be held in a temporary pool at La Défense Arena, an indoor stadium that is home of the storied Racing 92 rugby team and has been the venue for major concert tours such as The Rolling Stones, Taylor Swift and Paul McCartney.

The pool is set up at one end of the arena, with a warm-up pool located behind a curtain dividing the facility in half and leaving the capacity for the games at just over 15,000.

“The idea of being able to drop in and have a bigger fan base for the sport is really exciting,” said Australia’s Zac Stubblety-Cook, the reigning Olympic champion in the men’s 200-meter breaststroke. “Going into this arena, even the pool deck space, is really, really incredible. Being able to walk around and having space is actually a small detail but something that everyone has noticed.”

The next Summer Games, at Los Angeles in 2028, will look to make an even bigger splash.

After initially planning to construct a temporary aquatics stadium on the baseball field at the University of Southern California, LA organizers recently announced a series of venue changes that included moving the swimming competition to a portable pool at 70,000-seat SoFi Stadium, the dazzling home to a pair of NFL teams, the Rams and Chargers.

The planned setup will have a capacity of 38,000 seats — by far the largest swimming venue in Olympic history.

“Hopefully, we can carry that momentum of viewership, of getting people involved, casual swimmers, memberships, stuff like that, into a home Olympic games, which will probably be an even bigger circus and more fun,” Fink said.

Portable pools have created far more flexibility in the selection of swimming venues for major meets.

Over the past two decades, several world championships were held in large, multipurpose arenas that were built for sports such as basketball and tennis.

The U.S. trials were held in a temporary facility for the first time in 2004, when an outdoor stadium was constructed in the parking lot outside Long Beach Arena. Then, three straight trials were held at a 17,000-seat arena in Omaha, Nebraska, allowing more fans to attend.

The Indy trials took the event to an even higher level.

The Australians, who are the leading rivals to the powerhouse American squad, took note of the enormous facility and large crowds for the U.S. trials. Head coach Rohan Taylor hopes that his country will some day be able to emulate that Down Under.

“To do it for a trials or a domestic competition, it would be about finding the right facility for a drop-in pool and in a city that would probably come out and support the sport,” he said. “That’s one thing we’ve got to be better at, growing the kind of broader support of it.”

Taylor said it’s also important to focus on bolstering the sport at the grassroots level. The big arenas are certainly eye-opening, but swimming also needs more permanent, year-round facilities, which he described as a goal leading up to the 2032 Summer Games in Brisbane.

But, for now, he’s relishing the big stage in Paris.

“Walking into this facility is incredible,” Taylor said. “Seeing it full will be incredible.”

___

AP Sports Writer Jay Cohen contributed to this report.

JD Vance’s Yale Law School pedigree came up at least a dozen times at the Republican National Convention. His degree from the institution gives the inexperienced Vance more legitimacy and validates his Horatio Alger story.

The use of elite educational credentials by populist critics of elite education isn’t new. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who went to Yale College and Harvard Law School, did a version of the same thing when he was running for president. Senator Josh Hawley, he of the raised fist on Jan. 6, graduated from Yale Law in 2006. Representative Elise Stefanik, who spent much of the past year grilling college presidents on Capitol Hill, graduated from Harvard College. And Trump himself likes to brag about his bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School (although at the time, over half of applicants were accepted).

But Vance’s degree is central to his narrative in a way that it’s not for those other politicians. Admission to Yale was his main accomplishment when he wrote his best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” It cemented his rise to the elite. It framed Vance as an effective source to “explain” poor white politics (and poor white dysfunction) to the NPR-listening, tote-bag carrying, book-buying public. It’s no exaggeration to say that, without Yale Law School, there could be no phenomenon of JD Vance — at least, not by the tender age of 39.

Yale Law has also played a vital role in legal conservatism. At the Supreme Court, Justices Clarence Thomas (’74) and Samuel Alito (’75) have gone from being peripheral voices to becoming the authors of major new conservative opinions that seem likely to last at least a generation. One of the reasons they have such influence now is the appointment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh (Yale Law ’90). The court currently has an unprecedented four Yale lawyers, including liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor (’79). Together they account for nearly half of the nine Yale law school graduates that have ever sat court.

What makes the prominence of these figures fascinating is that there are so few conservative graduates of Yale Law School. A generation ago, Bill and Hillary Clinton, also both graduates of Yale Law, brought an extended network of their liberal classmates and friends to Washington. Such liberal Yale Law graduates are not hard to find — and remain prominent in a wide range of legal jobs, especially as professors. (I went there myself.)

Yale’s conservatives are something else again. The law school is small to begin with, graduating only around 200 students a year, meaning there are about 600 law students at a time. And while there’s no official count, the number of those who identify as conservative is not likely to be much greater than 10% — and might be smaller. Consider: The photo on the homepage of the Yale Federalist Society chapter features just 20 students.

Their rarity is doubtless one reason Yale Law conservatives ascend so quickly. Consider judicial clerkships. More than half of federal judges are conservative and look for clerks who will support their world view. At the Supreme Court, the conservative-to-liberal ratio is 2 to 1. That gives conservative students a significant leg up, statistically speaking.

As important, however, is the experience of alienation shared by so many Yale Law conservatives, which seems to harden their political views and also becomes a central part of their narratives. Thomas and Alito have both spoken extensively of feeling like outsiders at Yale. Neither came from the upper or upper-middle class. (Kavanaugh, in contrast, who did grow up upper-middle class, used to speak warmly about his social experiences at Yale and remains a relatively moderate conservative.)

Vance, who grew up poor, also experienced a sense of alienation at Yale, one he emphasized in his book and has played up further in his political career. For him, as for Thomas and Alito, Yale Law became a double-edged component of his self-perception and self-presentation. On the one hand, having gone there proves one is now a member of the elite. On the other, being exposed to Yale elites confirms one’s belief that populist conservatism is the right way to see the world.

Vance benefited enormously from Yale, making the connections that helped him to find a top-tier literary agent and launch his career in Silicon Valley. And it’s in part in hopes of providing this kind of elevator for working class students that elite institutions like Yale believe in the value of admitting students from a wide range of backgrounds. I believe in it myself.

But one result is the inevitable emergence of people who use their elite experience to become proponents of anti-elitism. That’s their right.

I would venture to suggest, however, that elite institutions can and should do better in being aware of and trying to minimize the alienation associated with being any kind of an outsider there — whether based on social class, race, religion, or conservative politics. Some culture shock is inevitable so long as elite educational institutions draw so heavily on the children of economic and educational elites. Yet we can teach our students, from day one through graduation, to think harder about the experiences of others, and to take some of the moralizing out of their encounters with people who think differently. The real-world effects might give us more thoughtful graduates and fewer reactionaries.

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People.”

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“Time Bandits,” which premiered Wednesday on Apple TV+, adopts the premise and particulars of Terry Gilliam’s wonderful 1981 comic fantasy adventure and stretches it, without breaking, into a television series. Created by Jemaine Clement, Taika Waititi and Iain Morris, it’s likable, lively, funny and fun.

Still, it’s best to put Gilliam’s film out of your mind, or at least not to mind the differences. There are some direct borrowings and a similar sort of humor, but where the movie is unsentimental, violent and grotesque — in a good way, I mean — the series is sentimental, not so violent and grotesque only when it comes to actual monsters. Most notably, the bandits, who were played by little people in the movie, led by the great David Rappaport and including Kenny Baker, the man inside R2-D2, are full-sized actors here. (There are little people in other roles, who appear to be set for a second-season plotline.)

As before, the central character is a small English boy named Kevin (Kal-El Tuck), whose room, unbeknownst to him, happens to be a portal through time and space. (Both Kevin and his room, the series suggests, are significant in a special way.) Kevin is an exuberant nerd whose impulsive lectures on history his parents, glued to their screens, find boring; his sister, Saffron (Kiera Thompson), a new character, regards him as ridiculous, pathetic and a little repulsive, as siblings can. She’ll play a large role in later episodes.

One night, a wardrobe in Kevin’s room begins to shake and emanate light, and when he opens the door, he finds himself on a faraway beach, in a faraway time, where a Viking is being chased by Saxons — nothing as dramatic as the knight on horseback that bursts into his bedroom in the film, but sufficiently alarming. Nevertheless, Kevin takes the opportunity to ask the hunted man “why the Vikings suddenly stopped their murderous ways and adopted agrarianism.”

The next night, the self-styled Time Bandits — they refer to themselves this way, as if it’s a band name they decided on — creep into his room. They’re on the run from the Supreme Being, whose cosmic map they have stolen in order to commit robberies and escape with the loot to different times. (They are bad at this.) Each has been given a defining personality and team specialty, like Doc Savage’s crew or the Impossible Mission Force.

Penelope (Lisa Kudrow, bringing the full Kudrow) describes the gang as a collective but herself as the leader and is continually having to switch from “I” to “we” when describing even the smallest of their accomplishments — which indeed are generally small. She’s also nursing a broken heart. There’s a running joke in which she can’t remember Kevin’s name, which remains surprisingly funny, given how often it’s repeated.

Bittelig (Rune Temte), says Penelope, introducing the bandits to Kevin, “has the strength of seven average-strength men” and “a sensitive side.” Judy (Charlyne Yi), “the master psychologist,” restates the obvious or gets it wrong; Alto (Tadhg Murphy), a flamboyant actor, is their master of disguise; and map-reader Widgit (Roger Jean Nsengiyumva), is the sometimes accurate navigator. The colorful diversity of types makes them less plausible as anonymous low-level employees of the Supreme Being, but I didn’t think much about it until I wrote that sentence.

To cut to the 10-episode chase, Kevin is swept up in their draft as they try to evade the Supreme Being, who initially manifests as a giant three-faced head, but soon enough will be revealed as Waititi. Co-creator Clement plays Pure Evil, who also wants the map, and sends a demonic agent (Rachel House) to get it. Good and Bad will prove equally problematic.

Co-written by Gilliam and Michael Palin, with appearances by Palin as a luckless dweeb through the ages and John Cleese as a posh Robin Hood, “Time Bandits,” the film, was very much a Python work. (Gilliam, the American in the group, created their animations.) Structurally, it’s a sketch show with a framing narrative, proceeding from the Napoleonic Wars to Sherwood Forest to ancient Greece to the Titanic and so on; its humor follows “Holy Grail” and “Life of Brian” in mixing historical and mythical scenarios with modern attitudes, issues and vernacular. Rowan Atkinson’s “Blackadder” series worked from a similar playback, as did the recently canceled pirate comedy “Our Flag Means Death,” where Waititi was an executive producer, director and co-star.

The series follows in that vein. It’s highly episodic — indeed, there are episodes even within episodes. In the first 46 minutes alone, we visit a sea battle in 18th-century Macao, Stonehenge under construction — “It’s very much a venue for hire, innit, you know, you got your banquets, your weddings, your sacrifices,” Kevin is told — and ancient Troy, where the bandits plan to steal a famous horse they are surprised to find is large and made of wood.

Further adventures will take them to Prohibition New York, the Maya empire, the African desert, the Ice Age and Georgian England. There is tension, given the stealing — Kevin does not approve, and especially not “stealing from history” — the pursuers and the unpredictable environments, though Kevin conveniently knows a lot about wherever they happen to be.

The departure of Yi halfway through production — they accused an unnamed actor of sexual harassment, a charge the production office found to be unsubstantiated — is handled awkwardly, though I’m not sure there was an especially elegant way to do it. But while it must have occasioned a good deal of rewriting, their absence has no effect on the larger story.

And there is a larger story. There’s a brutal simplicity to Gilliam’s film, which works perfectly over two hours. But this is a long series with plans to go longer, and though there’s enough variety to maintain interest from episode to episode, the added length seems to require something extra. We get motivations and explanations and … feelings. Toward the end of the season, meaningful speeches creep in; they can feel a little obvious, a little made to order. But it doesn’t take long for the jokes to take over again.

‘Time Bandits’

Rating: TV-PG

How to watch: Apple TV+

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