France staged a historic and perhaps, the most exciting Olympic Games opening ceremony yesterday to kick start the Paris 2024 Games.

For the first time in the history of the Games, Paris staged an impressive opening ceremony outside a stadium.

When it was first announced, a few doubting ‘Thomases’ were alarmed over the arrangement put in place and others over security.

But pessimists were silenced with yesterday’s spectacular event that saw athletes parade in boats along the Seine River.

The ceremony marked a shift from the usual scenes of athletes marching around athletics tracks and dressed resplendently in attires designed in national colours with placards indicating names of their countries.

Yesterday’s invention gave participants and viewers a rare vibrant river parade that travelled through the heart of the French capital.

The river Seine replaced the traditional track with the iconic Paris landmarks creating a beautiful scene for the event.

The athletes were grouped with their national teams on the boats and ultimately arrived opposite to where official protocols were conducted, and the Olympic cauldron lit to open the 2024 Games officially.

In all, nearly 100 boats carried approximately 10,500 athletes.

As the various teams filed past, curiously, one could predict or imagine how the medal table may be like by August 11 when the Games end.

Team America was among the heavily represented sides in this edition with others including Great Britain, Australia, the Netherlands and others also parading very large contingents.

But there was also the group of countries whose numbers could compete for the smallest team prize tag at the Games, if there was one.

Ghana was in this particular group with nine members, yet poised to make an impact.

What that impact might be is what may keep Ghanaians glued to their television sets to watch which discipline and athlete would prove skeptics wrong.

Team Ghana is making appearances in athletics (men’s 100m, 200m, 4x100m), women’s high jump and swimming.

Athletes expected in action for Team Ghana comprises of Benjamin Azamati and Abdul- Rasheed Saminu (men’s 100m and men’s 4x100m), Rose Amoaniwaa Yeboah (women’s high jump), Harry Stacey (men’s 100m freestyle) and Joselle Mensah (women’s 50m freestyle).

Their times and records obviously do not present them as medal prospect, however the men’s 4x100m relay has shown much promise with their performance at the Africa Games where they lost narrowly in the finals of the 4x100m event to Nigeria in a photo finish.

The Nigerians ended on 38.41 seconds with Ghana crossing the tape on 38.43 seconds.

But they headed to Bahamas to book the Paris 2024 ticket with an improved time of 38.29 seconds to win the Olympic Qualifying Round 2 race.

That feat also recorded better individual times from each of the athletes that featured.

The height of Ghanaian optimism was the announcement of an automatic qualification to the semi-finals of the 4×100 metre race at the Games for being part of the 16 countries to have qualified from the World Relay Championship in Bahamas in May this year.

It gives the quartetsome vim ahead of the semifinal showdown, but must be aware of the nature of competition at that level.

With this background, Ghanaians have every reason to be optimistic about the chances of the relay quartet. At the semifinal stage, a little bit of hard work and concentration could ship the team to a dream final against the ‘best of the best’ relay teams, notably USA, Jamaica, Netherlands, Nigeria, Italy and a few that may be out to cause upsets.

It is a decent challenge they must embrace.

That, in no doubt should spur on other members of Team Ghana who are now considered as dark horses to make that expected impact.

By Andrew Nortey