The organisers of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games have issued an apology after their controversial Opening Ceremony appeared to mock Christians around the world with a drag queen reenactment of the Last Supper, complete with some dude’s nutsack hanging out of his shorts and a young child sitting at the table with them.

Btw, what the f*ck was all this about? A drag queen mockery of the Last Supper at the Olympics? Would they have mocked any other religion like this? Appalling decision. pic.twitter.com/50uREKJEJd

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) July 27, 2024

For a couple days, the backlash on social media and from various critics and political figures didn’t seem to bother the organisers of the Paris Olympics, but now that advertisers and sponsors are pulling out of the Olympics, they decided to issue the following statement via spokesperson Anne Descamps. Apparently, they didn’t mean to offend anyone:

“Clearly there was never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group. (The opening ceremony) tried to celebrate community tolerance.

We believe this ambition was achieved. If people have taken any offense we are really sorry.”

Really? I mean, there’s no way they didn’t see that backlash coming when they were putting the Opening Ceremony together, right? Paris 2024 president Tony Estanguet added:

“We imagined a ceremony to show our values and our principles so we gave a very committed message. The idea was to really trigger a reflection. We wanted to have a message as strong as possible.

Naturally we had to take into account the international community. Having said that – it is a French ceremony for the French games – so we trusted our artistic director. We have freedom of expression in France and we wanted to protect it.”

Finally, Thomas Jolly, the artistic director who crafted the controversial opening ceremony, also commented on the backlash. He said they intended to celebrate different gender identities with a Greek-pagan party:

“The idea was to do a big pagan party linked to the gods of Olympus. You’ll never find in my work any desire to mock or denigrate anyone. I wanted a ceremony that brings people together, that reconciles, but also a ceremony that affirms our Republican values of liberty, equality and fraternity.”

He also said:

“Our idea was inclusion. Naturally when we want to include everyone and not exclude anyone questions are raised. Our subject was not to be subversive. We never wanted to be subversive.

We wanted to talk about diversity. Diversity means being together. We wanted to include everybody. In France, we have artistic freedom. We are lucky in France to live in a free country.”

Well, I’m not sure you can call that an apology exactly, and the comment about artistic freedom seems a bit silly given what happened with the Charlie Hebdo drawings years ago. If you can only take the p1ss out of some religious groups and not others, do you really have artistic freedom?

Anyway, even without the religious outrage, does anyone actually think the Opening Ceremony was any good? There could have been more of a geographical, cultural or athletic focus given it’s the Olympic Games and all, rather than a weird LGBT rendition of the Last Supper, which doesn’t really seem relevant to the Olympic Games. It does seem like they tried way too hard to be controversial and get people talking, and it’s all just backfired in their face and so now they’re acting like they were trying to be artistic and didn’t mean to offend anyone.

Los Angeles is hosting the next Olympic Games in 2028 – wonder if they will take aboard any lessons from Paris?

For the Olympics commentator who has just been sacked following sexist remarks he made about the Aussie women’s swimming team, click HERE.