Paris 2024 Olympics: Celine Dion’s comeback brings new emotion to real-life, tragic love between an athlete and France’s most famous singer
“If the sky should fall into the sea, and the stars fade all around me …” so begins France’s most famous song about love: “L’hymne à l’amour.”
On the night of the Opening Ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, the sky was stormy with rain clouds, the River Seine replaced the sea and any possible stars were overshadowed by the glittering Eiffel Tower, yet Edith Piaf’s timeless tribute to a lost love sounded just as poignant as the first time it was heard more than half a century ago.
Standing on the balcony of the Eiffel Tower, the Olympic rings affixed to its iron sides, world-renowned singer Celine Dion serenaded more than 300,000 spectators, including an estimated 6,800 athletes, in an emotional comeback from illness.
Her powerful performance marked the first time that Dion has sung live since she was diagnosed with stiff-person syndrome in 2022. The rare neurological disease causes muscle spams and rigidity in the torso and limbs. Most devastating for Dion, the disease has also made it hard for the Canadian singer to control her vocal cords.
Seventy-five years before Dion's appearance at Paris 2024, another legendary singer, Piaf, performed the cult song for the first time, the same raw emotion in her voice.
The French icon composed the lyrics to “L’hymne à l’amour" in a house she shared with French-Algerian professional boxer and world middleweight champion Marcel Cerdan as a tribute to their love.
Celine Dion performs on the Eiffel Tower during the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games Paris 2024.
The singer and athlete met in New York in 1948 during Piaf's tour of the United States. Love at first sight quickly became a whirlwind affair.
That love story met a shattering end on 28 October 1949 when Cerdan’s plane crashed in the mid-Atlantic. The 33-year-old boxer was on his way to North America to meet Piaf at her request.
Her lover's fatal accident sent Piaf into a downward spiral of grief and guilt, which she tried to smother with morphine and alcohol. She never recovered from it and died a few days before the 14th anniversary of Cerdan’s death, in 1963.
Three-quarters of a century on, five kilometres from the house where Piaf wrote her love hymn's tragically prophetic lyrics, they rang out from the balcony of the Eiffel Tower as a timeless tribute to the City of Love and the passion for life.
And as the song's last notes brought the Opening Ceremony of Paris 2024 to a close, the banks of the River Seine — witnesses to many real-life love stories — erupted in cheers.