Olympic Opening Ceremony Boat Parade Already Being Scaled Back

Back in January, it was revealed that the opening ceremonies for the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics would involve a giant, spectacle of a boat parade down the Seine.

At the time, I pointed out what an absolute dose of televised Ambien this would be, and now it's even worse than we thought because the only thing more boring than a spectacle of a boat parade is a stripped-down boat parade.

According to Yahoo Sports, the boat parade — they like to say "flotilla," but let's call a boat parade a boat parade — has been scaled back for logistical and security reasons.

The plan was to allow as many as 600,000 people to line the river banks to watch the boat parade free of charge and anyone could attend. However, that number has been essentially cut in half, and the event will now be invite-only.

That makes sense. You can't have 600,000 people showing up for the biggest open-air event in Olympic history — which this would have been — without having some idea of who is there. In this day and age, that's not only a bad idea, it's completely irresponsible.

So, good on event organizers for realizing this and making the boat parade as safe as can be.

This wasn't the only problem that the boat parade caused. Booksellers have been hanging around the river for centuries. Miraculously, Amazon hasn't put them out of business, and because they're still in business, officials wanted to get them out of the way for the big boat parade.

The booksellers were obviously not happy with this.

So, the boat parade is causing some headaches, but it looks like they're still going to go ahead with it. 

I hope I'm wrong about the boat parade — although, I know I'm not. It'll do its job of kicking off the Games but will also lull everyone to sleep.