With Paris 2024 just days away, Olympics fever is mounting across the world and here in Zimbabwe sports fans are keen to see how well the seven Zimbabwean athletes fare in their various disciplines.
All the action of the 2024 Summer Olympics will be carried live by DStv’s SuperSport, which traditionally supplies one of the best Olympic coverage offerings in the world and will help bring this feast of sporting effort and achievement right to viewers’ homes and other watching venues of choice.
SuperSport will be broadcasting all gold medal events live and introducing a SuperScreen channel that features 10 split screens, providing viewers with an overview of all our Olympic channels, ensuring that viewers never miss a moment. This equates to an unrivalled 900 live events and over 2 000 hours of live Paris 2024 Olympics action on Your World of Champions. We will also have 8 dedicated Olympic linear channels (including a dedicated 24-hour Olympics News Channel), 5 streaming channels and 4 overflow channels.
Charity Njanji, head of corporate affairs and public relations of MultiChoice Zimbabwe, said the two weeks of Olympics coverage would be an intense and compelling period of sporting history and SuperSport was geared to giving viewers the best access possible.
“From the opening ceremony to the closing ceremony, cameras will be focused on what the thousands of young athletes of the world are doing and on what heights of sporting achievement will be attained,” she said.
This will be the third time Paris has hosted a Summer Olympic Games, having hosted in 1900 and 1924. This year’s event marks 100 years since that last hosting and the City of Light is ready to provide what it says will be the best games to date. Only one other city – London – has hosted the Summer Olympics three times.
French President Emmanuel Macron is scheduled to officially open the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad – as it is formally known – on the evening of Friday July 26, and the massive set of sporting offerings will then run up to the closing ceremony on Sunday August 11. Paris is, of course, the main host city, but certain events will be taking place at 16 other venues in France, along with one subsite in Tahiti, an overseas French territory.
Unusually, the opening ceremony will not be confined to a stadium venue but will be spread through the Jardins du Trocadero and along the Seine river. Because of the non-stadium nature of the event, it is thought the ceremony will have a live participation by 600 000 people. The closing ceremony will be held in the well-known Stade de France.
- SuperSport takes fans to Paris
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The motto of Paris 2024 is Games Wide Open and 10 714 athletes are registered to take part in 32 sports spread over 329 events. Breakdancing will make its Olympics debut, while karate, baseball and softball will not be returning. Skateboarding, surfing and sport climbing will return after their debuts in the Tokyo games.
This year’s event returns the summer games to its traditional leap year position, something that changed for Tokyo 2020 because the Covid crisis caused its postponement into 2021.
As always, records will be broken and milestones achieved, while the total bill for the whole event is expected to be more than US$10 billion. Host cities always hope for massive returns in tourism receipts and in a range of other benefits.
Zimbabwe’s representatives are Isaac Mpofu and Rutendo Nyahora in the Marathon, Tapiwa Makarawu and Makanakaishe Charamba in the 200m sprints, Stephen Cox in rowing, Denilson Cyprianos in the 200m backstroke swimming and Paige van der Westhuizen in the 100m freestyle swimming. They will be accompanied by four sports officials and a three-person management team, and Zimbabweans will look out for them at the opening ceremony, when the alphabetically-staged teams make their debut appearance to the world in a boat parade along the Seine.
“We are excited to be able to facilitate ringside viewing for the world’s greatest sports spectacle and the range of channels being made available by SuperSport will afford variety and easy access,” said Njanji.
“With Paris being in our same time zone, this year’s Games will be even easier to access as the times of events are very much viewer-friendly for us, a contrast to the two previous Games in Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro. It’s an unparalleled chance to enjoy a huge range of sports offerings and there’s nothing to beat it from a family viewing perspective.”
