The Asian Winter Games opened yesterday in Sapporo, Japan with a daytime Opening Ceremony. A lot of people liked it, including Angela Ruggeiro, the gold medal-winning American hockey player who's now the head of the IOC Athletes' Commission. Ruggeiro, who's also involved in the Los Angeles bid for the 2024 Games, even went so far as to suggest the LA 2024 Opening Ceremony should be during the day.
Ruggeiro's rationale for advocating the daytime Opening Ceremony makes a lot of sense. A lot of athletes that are competing on the first day of the Games have to miss the Opening Ceremony in order to prepare for their event. In Rio, the Opening Ceremony started at 8:00 and was a relatively short three hours, but that still meant athletes were on their feet for that long. The Opening Ceremony is usually much longer than that. Then, if you throw in the travel time back to the Athletes' Village, it's well after midnight when they're finally going to bed. That doesn't exactly lead to optimal performance, so it makes sense that a number of athletes decide to skip the Opening Ceremony (or, in the case of the 2016 U.S. women's volleyball team, leave early).
In Sapporo, however, the Opening Ceremony started at 4:00 local time and was over at 7:00. They also had the parade of nations at the beginning, allowing athletes to march into the stadium and get back to the village with plenty of time to rest.
Although, the Olympic Opening Ceremony being held at night is a relatively recent development (the first one wasn't until 1992), it's since become the norm. The Opening Ceremony hasn't taken place during the day since the last Games in Japan--Nagano 1998. The last Summer Olympics with an afternoon Opening Ceremony was Seoul 1988.
From a logistical perspective, the nighttime Opening Ceremony makes a lot of sense. For starters, it takes place on a Friday. In a bustling metropolis, the workday commute in the afternoon would make a daytime ceremony a traffic nightmare. Not to mention the obvious fact that the weather is usually cooler after the sun goes down, which is especially important in the summer (I saw another article today that said the daytime temperatures in Tokyo in July of 2020 could be in the high 90s). If you have the ceremony at night, the spectators are more likely to be comfortable.
Then you throw in the fact that a Friday night is going to generate a much larger TV audience for the host broadcaster, nobody in their right minds would schedule such a ratings-generator at any time other than prime time (why do you think all other major sporting events are at night?). You also have the increased drama that comes in with the lighting of the Olympic cauldron, one of the seminal moments of any Opening Ceremony. Would that flaming arrow in Barcelona been anywhere near as powerful if it wasn't against the backdrop of nighttime darkness? Or Cathy Freeman in that flaming waterfall in Sydney?
With all that being said, if LA does host the 2024 Olympics, the Opening Ceremony likely will start in the afternoon or early evening, just like it did in 1984. Although, the reason for that is obvious. And it has nothing to do with the ability of the athletes to march in the Parade of Nations. It's because the East Coast is three hours ahead of LA. So, the Opening Ceremony will start at 5:00 Pacific (or, more likely 5:30 Pacific) because that's 8:00 in New York and 7:00 in Chicago. And you know NBC will have its say and make sure it's early enough to be live in prime time on the East Coast. That's what they did in Vancouver, where the actual Opening Ceremony started at 6:00 (9:00 Eastern).
While the daytime Opening Ceremony in LA would be dictated by other reasons, it is an interesting concept, and I wouldn't be surprised to see somebody give it a try. Especially with the next three Olympics slated for East Asia (after all, with the time difference, a Friday morning Opening Ceremony at Beijing 2022 would be on Thursday night in the U.S.).
It makes more sense to try the daytime Opening Ceremony in the Winter, too. The whole point I made about the heat for the summer applies in reverse here. It's cold either way, but it's warmer in the afternoon and you don't want fans sitting there on a cold winter's night. Likewise, it gets dark earlier in the winter, so you can still light the cauldron with the dramatic background of darkness (or, at least, twilight).
At a time when the Olympic brand doesn't mean much and the idea of hosting the Games is viewed of more as a burden than anything else, it wouldn't hurt to embrace some innovation. And, who knows, a daytime Opening Ceremony just might be the way to do that. It doesn't seem likely and would require a lot of work to figure it out logistically, but it's definitely an idea worth at least considering.
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