Olympic Games highlights: your day-by-day guide to the best bits in Paris

Wednesday 24 July Day -2

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  Men’s football
  France get their tournament under way in Marseille against the USA in what should be the key game in Group A – the two other sides in the group, Guinea and New Zealand, play just along the coast in Nice a few hours earlier. Thierry Henry, who was appointed coach of France Under-21s last August, leads a side packed with young talent (and 33-year-old Alexandre Lacazette), including Crystal Palace’s Hammersmith-born forward Michael Olise.

Thursday 25 July Day -1

• Women’s handball France won silver and then gold in the past two Olympic finals, and were runners-up and winners in the past two world championships. Their chances of back-to-back golds have been boosted by the absence of Russia, who reached the last two Olympic finals. That leaves Norway, who won bronze in both Rio and Tokyo and reached the last two world championship finals, as their key rivals and on this day we see them both, as France play Hungary and Norway face Sweden in their first games of the tournament.

Friday 26 July Day 0

• Opening ceremony
  With the Stade de France busy hosting the rugby sevens Paris has planned an innovative opening ceremony based along a 6km stretch of the Seine, with the athletes parading not at the end but at the start, and not on foot but on 94 boats, passing landmarks including the Louvre and Notre Dame before ending up at the Trocadéro for the main show, about which organisers have been tight-lipped. “France is Édith Piaf, it’s also opera, it’s rap, it’s a whole range of musical styles,” said Thomas Jolly, the creative director. “France is cheese, but it’s also the pretzel, and it’s also couscous.”

Saturday 27 July Day 1

• Shooting
  With a scheduled end of 11.50am local time the 10m mixed team air rifle is expected to pip the women’s synchronised 3m springboard diving by a matter of minutes to be the first gold medal decided in Paris. Whichever wins the race there’s a good chance the anthem played at the end will be the same: the latest world championships in both events were won by Chinese athletes (though they will be hotly contested, and Britain’s Yasmin Harper and Scarlett Mew Jensen claimed world championship silver in the diving last year).

• Men’s rugby
  Antoine Dupont, France’s captain, missed the Six Nations to throw himself into Olympic preparations, declaring a gold medal “the holy grail of the sport, as simple as that”, and organisers have scheduled the men’s final in the hope that he will help them get their Games off to the best possible start. It is far from a done deal, though: France failed to reach the final four in the sport’s two previous Olympic outings, while Fiji have won both golds.

• Men’s handball
  In the past two Olympic finals Denmark beat France (in Rio) and France beat Denmark (in Tokyo). Of the five world championships in the past decade France have won two and Denmark the most recent three, extending their unbeaten run in the event to 28 games by beating France in last year’s final. This year they play on the first day of the men’s tournament, though it would be no surprise if they meet again when the medals are decided on 11 August.

Sunday 28 July Day 2

• Swimming
  Between 2014 and 2020 Adam Peaty won every available global gold in the 100m breaststroke – including at two Olympics, two Commonwealth Games and three world championships – and broke the world record five times. But after Tokyo he stepped away from the pool, citing mental health issues. He returned last October, with his eyes on this day. Assuming they both safely navigated Saturday’s heats, his key rival could be Qin Haiyang, China’s breaststroke king, who in the 2023 world championships completed a treble of 50m, 100m and 200m.

• Men’s basketball
  The United States have won 16 of the 20 men’s basketball golds, including the last four, and with LeBron James in an all-star side are inevitable favourites for another. James’s notable teammates include Stephen Curry, a four-time NBA champion, two-time NBA MVP, and by a massive margin the NBA’s all-time three-point leader, who remarkably is playing his first Olympics at 36. Today they get their tournament under way against a Serbia side that has in its ranks this year’s NBA MVP in Nikola Jokic of the Denver Nuggets.

• Women’s street skateboarding
  Japan won four of the six women’s skateboarding medals in Tokyo, including both golds, and in the street discipline have five of the world’s current top seven (in park they have four of the top six). But Brazil’s world No 3, Rayssa Leal, has high hopes. Nicknamed Fadinha (little fairy – after her first viral video, of her attempting and eventually nailing a heelflip in a fairy costume aged seven), Leal won silver in Tokyo aged 13, has got better since, and will be out to sprinkle some magic at La Concorde.

Monday 29 July Day 3

• Diving: men’s synchronised 10m platform final
  Tom Daley is back for his fifth Games, and with Matty Lee – with whom he won this event in Tokyo – ruled out with a back injury he has been paired this time with Noah Williams. Williams finished 27th out of 29 entrants in the individual 10m platform in 2021 – “I did awful, so bad,” he says – and the new pair’s preparations have been hampered by the fact that Daley now lives in Los Angeles, but in their first international competition, February’s world championships, they won silver.

• Equestrianism: eventing jumping team and individual final
  The grounds of the Chateau de Versailles will provide a spectacular backdrop to the equestrian events, with today’s finale of the eventing competition using the temporary arena by the Grand Canal. Tom McEwen won a silver in the individual event in Tokyo, while the British squad took the team gold. McEwen will be back hoping to go one better, having swapped his horse Toledo de Kerser for JL Dublin. “Dubs is the whole package,” says McEwen.

• Cycling: men’s cross-country
  In 2021 Tom Pidcock won this event on the same day as Daley won diving gold, and the schedule has thrown them together again. The race will be held on the entirely human-made Elancourt Hill, the highest point in the Paris region, which started life as a dumping ground for the area’s sandstone quarries and after their closure graduated to being used for landfill. What certainly isn’t rubbish is the view over the city from the top. Nick Floros, the South African who designed the cross-country courses in Rio and Tokyo, has mapped the route again.

Tuesday 30 July Day 4

• Swimming : women’s 100m backstroke
  Kaylee McKeown, Australia’s backstroke queen, is going for six golds in Paris – twice the number she won in Tokyo – and today could bring her first, with the 100m final in the evening session. McKeown broke her own world record last October and goes in as overwhelming favourite; Thursday, Friday and Saturday’s 200m backstroke and 200m individual medley double will be a much harder test.

• Surfing: men’s and women’s gold medal match
  Olympic organisers chose to hold the surfing competition in Teahupo’o – approximate translation “wall of skulls”, though it’s been nicknamed The End of the Road – in Tahiti, with athletes staying in a cruise ship moored offshore after locals objected to plans to build housing for them (they could not stop the construction of a judging tower in the reef). The attraction is what surfer.com described as “without a doubt one of the heaviest, scariest, most dangerous left-hand reef break waves in the entire world”.

• Men’s triathlon
  The first of the triathlon events – the women’s is tomorrow, and the mixed relay next Monday. Britain’s Alex Yee took silver in Tokyo, and also won the test event on this course, starting at the base of Pont Alexander III and taking in many key Paris landmarks, last year. “It’s such an iconic venue that we’re racing at and we’re so lucky to be able to swim in the Seine and ride up the Champs Élysées,” he said.

Wednesday 31 July Day 5

• BMX freestyle
  In Tokyo Britain’s Charlotte Worthington and Declan Brooks went into their finals seeded fourth and seventh respectively and came out with a gold and a bronze, illustrating the event’s unpredictability. Both are back again but Britain’s best medal chance looks to be 23-year-old Kieran Reilly, the reigning world champion who made his name by becoming the first person to land a triple kick flair in 2022.

• Gymnastics: men’s all-around final
  Daiki Hashimoto won gold in Tokyo three years ago, has won two world championships since and goes into today’s all-around final as favourite. “I will remain steadfast in surpassing my previous accomplishments. My commitment is unwavering, fuelled by a resolute determination,” he said this year. Meanwhile the US are hoping for what would be just their second title, and first since 2004. “We’re going to be very deadly. This is going to be a fun Olympics. We are fully loaded,” said Fred Richard, who won world championship bronze last year.

• Swimming
  France’s Léon Marchand is the son of Xavier Marchand and Céline Bonnet, both former Olympic swimmers, is coached at Arizona State by Michael Phelps’s former mentor Bob Bowman, is probably the greatest swimmer in the world, and is about to have the biggest night of his life. The 200m butterfly and 200m breaststroke finals were originally due to run consecutively, but after intensive lobbying the schedule was changed to separate the events by an hour and a half and give Marchand a greater chance of success. Now he has to perform.

Thursday 1 August Day 6

• Rowing: women’s four
  Helen Glover retired after the Rio Olympics, retired again after Tokyo, and now here she is, aged 38 and a mother of three, back for probably (“I feel I should never say never now,” she says) her last Olympics. She won gold in the pairs in 2012 and 2016 and is now in the four, with whom she claimed bronze in last year’s world championships.

• Gymnastics: women’s all-around final
  In 2021 Simone Biles’s unexpected attack of the twisties was one of the stories of the Olympics, her troubles in the team event leading her to withdraw from the individual all-around competition to focus on her mental health. This June she won the event at the US Championships for the ninth time, and by a massive margin, and today she will be aiming for redemption.

• Golf: men’s individual stroke play
  Le Golf National, where Europe hammered the US in the 2018 Ryder Cup, is the venue for the golf events. “It might not be a pure links course, but it is traditionally firm and fast, and can throw up some tricky conditions,” Rory McIlroy said (in 2016, though it has not changed much). McIlroy is back, looking for his first medal after losing out to CT Pan in a seven-man bronze-medal playoff three years ago.

Friday 2 August Day 7

• Trampoline
  Most Olympic disciplines look an awful lot like hard work, involving as they do large amounts of running about and other effortful endeavours. Without for a moment questioning the dedication that goes into mastering it, trampoline is unusually joyful: just watching it is enough to put a spring into anyone’s step. Sadly it’s all over in one day so gorge while you can, as Team GB’s Bryony Page attempts to complete the set after silver in Rio and bronze in Tokyo.

• Windsurfing: men and women medal series
  There has been a major change since the last Olympics, with the RS:X out and the eyecatching iQFoil in. The board is now attached to hydrofoils, which lift it out of the water when it’s going at speed. The Dutch tend to excel in this discipline but keep an eye out for France’s Nicolas Goyard, keeping it in the family after his brother Thomas won silver in Tokyo, and Britain’s Emma Wilson, who is aiming to improve on the bronze she won three years ago.

• Judo: men’s +100kg
  France’s legendary judoka Teddy Riner, a three-time Olympic and 11-times (that’s 11 times) world champion, goes for yet another medal. Judo is extraordinarily popular in France – about 10% of eight-year-olds play regularly – and whatever his result Riner will be acclaimed as a hero. The 35-year-old has already said he plans to continue to Los Angeles: “Why would I stop when I love what I do?”

Saturday 3 August Day 8

• Gymnastics: men’s pommel final
  In his last ever event Max Whitlock is attempting to become the first gymnast ever to win four Olympic medals on the same apparatus. Since he won gold in Tokyo Whitlock has retired, unretired (“I felt like a complete waste of space”), and had a generally positive return, with occasional hiccups and a few minor injuries. “There are still areas I can improve but I’m definitely on the right track,” he said in March of his preparations. Also being decided today: the men’s floor and women’s vault.

• Athletics: women’s 100m final
  The second night of athletics at the Stade de France and things are hotting up, with five titles to be decided including the women’s 100m, in which the USA’s Sha’Carri Richardson will aim to stop Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Shericka Jackson hoovering up all the medals for Jamaica. For Fraser-Price this will be a final meet, 16 years after she won gold in Beijing. “I want to finish on my own terms,” she says.

• Swimming: women’s 800m freestyle
  At a meet in Orlando in February Canada’s 17-year-old tyro Summer McIntosh beat Katie Ledecky in the 800m freestyle, the American’s first defeat over the distance in any kind of final for 13 years. But McIntosh, who trains at the University of Florida alongside Ledecky, has decided to concentrate on other events in Paris leaving Ledecky strong favourite to cement her all-time-great status with a fourth successive Olympic gold over the distance.

Sunday 4 August Day 9

• Archery: men’s individual medal rounds
  Before the start of the Olympics South Korea, the sport’s dominant nation, had nearly twice as many archery gold medals (27) as any other country (the USA with 14), but they could struggle here as the world No 1, Marcus D’Almeida, Brazil’s athlete of the year and World Archery’s Archer of 2023, bids to become his nation’s first medallist in the discipline, at his third Games. “I just dream of producing the best shot I can,” he says. “I don’t want to put pressure on myself. I just want to give it my best.”

• Tennis: men’s singles final
  Novak Djokovic has won everything worth winning in tennis, with one glaring exception. His bronze in Beijing in 2008 remains the highlight of his Olympic career – he has reached the last four three times, but the top three only once – while in 2016 he suffered his first first-round defeat since 2009. At 37 this is surely the last chance, but he injured a knee at the French Open and returns to Roland Garros in far from ideal circumstances. The women’s doubles final follows, the last tennis match of the Olympics.

• Cycling: women’s road race
  Organisers promise “a wide variety of landscapes switching between wooded areas [and] more urban segments”, much of the former running along local cycling hotspot the Chevreuse Valley, with the race concluding with three cobble-strewn laps of a Parisian circuit around Montmartre. We can only hope for drama on a par with 2021, when Annemiek van Vleuten’s enthusiastic celebrations after winning what she thought was gold were curtailed when she was informed that Anna Kiesenhofer, author of a stunning solo breakaway, had actually beaten her to it.

Monday 5 August Day 10

• Canoe slalom: kayak cross men’s and women’s final
  A hybrid of normal kayak race, the dodgems and the Hunger Games, the kayak cross event is wild, splashy carnage. It also has the potential to be a very good one for Team GB: at last year’s world championships Joe Clarke won the men’s event, while Mallory Franklin and Kimberley Woods finished second and third in the women’s. Clarke won gold in the men’s K1 in Rio, is back in the squad after being left out in 2021, and hoping for double success this time. The K1 final is on 1 August.

• Badminton: men’s and women’s singles finals
  China dominate Olympic badminton, and won three times as many medals as their nearest challenger (Chinese Tapei) in 2021. China’s Shi Yuqi is the men’s world No 1 but Viktor Axelsen, a 6ft 4in Dane, is hoping to defend his title despite having some injury problems this year – he promised to “come back really scary for the Olympics” . Korea’s An Se-young is the women’s No 1 and has instantly rediscovered top form after a month out with a knee injury.

• Athletics: men’s pole vault
  There are few track and field athletes who dominate their event like Armand “Mondo” Duplantis in the pole vault. The US-born Swede (his father represented the USA internationally and introduced his son to vaulting as a three-year-old; his mother was a Swedish heptathlete), broke the world record twice in 2020, three times in 2022 and twice in 2023 before nudging it to 6.24m in China in April. In Tokyo he missed the record by millimetres; tonight he will want to make up for it.

Tuesday 6 August Day 11

• Athletics: men’s 1500m final
  Jakob Ingebrigtsen won gold in Tokyo but since then has twice been pipped by Britons at global tournaments, beaten by Jake Wightman at the 2022 world championships and Josh Kerr at the 2023 event. The 1500m has been a thrilling, hotly contested event in recent years and there are several athletes who could halt the Kerr v Ingebrigtsen hype including another Norwegian in Narve Gilje Nordås, who is coached by Ingebrigtsen’s estranged father, Gjert (who has not been accredited for the Olympics because he faces criminal charges in Norway).

• Skateboarding: women’s park final
  The 14-year-old Australian and world No 2 Arisa Trew is one to keep an eye on here: last year she became the first female to pull off a 720, and in June was the first to land a 900 (two and a half rotations) and a switch McTwist (if you know you know). The park course is too slow to allow those tricks, but she will be trying to push the boundaries. Meanwhile Sky Brown, who won bronze for Britain at 13 in Tokyo, returns.

• Greco-Roman wrestling: men’s 130kg gold final
  At the other end of the Olympic age spectrum, Cuba’s Mijaín López, 42 in August, is attempting to become the first athlete to win five consecutive gold medals in the same individual event – and in so doing to present a plausible argument for being the greatest ever Olympian. “I will do it,” he said in March. “The fatigue is there, the physical pain is there, so the mind has to be strong, the motivation has to be even stronger.”

Wednesday 7 August Day 12

• Sailing: mixed dinghy medal race
  In which Britain’s odd couple Vita Heathcote and Chris Grube – she’s 23 and going into her first Games, he’s 39 and has been tempted out of retirement for one last go – have a chance of medals after coming second at the world championships in Mallorca this year, despite suffering from illness, injury and having worked together only for a matter of months. Heathcote’s uncle, Nick Rogers, won silver medals in 2004 and 2008. Spain’s Jordi Xammar and Nora Brugman, who won that event in Mallorca, and Japan’s Keiju Okada and Miho Yoshioka are the key rivals.

• Artistic swimming: team acrobatic routine
  In 2022 World Aquatics changed its rules to allow men to compete in artistic swimming at the Olympics, and it looked like the American Bill May was going to be the one to make history. In February he was in the US team that won world championship bronze. “They’re going to see a male in the Olympics, and it’s going to inspire them, whether it be a male, female, anyone that has a dream,” he said. In June he was left out of the US squad. There will be no men in the artistic swimming this year. It’ll still be amazing, in its odd way.

• Boxing
  This could be the last round for Olympic boxing – the IOC has set a deadline of early next year to find a governing body to replace the IBA as its partners, leaving the sport’s place at Los Angeles 2028 in doubt. So catch it while you can: two golds are up for grabs today, while the delightfully named Delicious Orie, the Briton coached by the man who oversaw Anthony Joshua’s run to gold, Rob McCracken, will hope to be involved in +92kg semi-finals.

Thursday 8 August Day 13

• Climbing
  The last day with both men and women in action, with the women’s boulder and lead semi-final followed by the men’s speed final (the one event for each gender in Tokyo, combining all three disciplines, has since fissured into two). Since 2021 speed climbing has got a lot, well, speedier: the men’s world record has been broken 11 times since then, with Indonesia’s Veddriq Leonardo becoming the first person to go under five seconds last year and the USA’s Sam Watson bettering that mark twice on a single day in April.

• Track cycling
  Two of the great velodrome events conclude today, with the quarter-finals, semis and final of the women’s keirin – where riders follow a speed-controlled electric bike for a few laps before launching a wild sprint for the line – breaking up the four events of the men’s omnium, each of greater drama than the last, concluding with the brilliant, chaotic, bewildering and wonderful points race. The schedule is reversed, with men’s keirin and women’s omnium (plus the women’s sprint finals), on Sunday.

• Athletics: women’s 400m hurdles
  The anticipated showdown between Femke Bol of the Netherlands and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone of the USA, the two fastest women of all time over this distance, could be one of the highlights of this year’s athletics competition. The American spent 2023 focusing on the flat and returned to the hurdles in Atlanta in May with the fastest time of the year so far, a mark that Bol beat 12 days later. Bol has also impressed on the flat in the last couple of years, breaking the world indoor record twice, but this is where they are best.

Friday 9 August Day 14

• Women’s breaking
  The breaking competition, incongruously held at the historic Place de la Concorde, lasts only two days with the women’s (AKA b-girls) event today and the men (or b-boys) tomorrow. Nicka – the Lithuanian Dominika Banevic, who has been breaking since the age of eight – won the world and European championships last year aged 16 but the two Asian Games finalists, 671 (China’s Liu Qingyi) and Ami (Japan’s Ami Yuasa) are seen as the breakers most likely to make tonight’s final throw down.

• Wrestling: men’s 86kg final
  There have been rivalries, and then there was David Taylor v Hassan Yazdani. For years it seemed nothing could keep these representatives of clashing cultures of the USA and Iran apart: in Tokyo both breezed through the competition before Taylor’s last-second takedown saw him edge a thrilling final 4-3, and they’ve gone on to meet in the final of every major championship since. But in a stunning upset Taylor, by then unbeaten in two and a half years, lost to Aaron Brooks in the US trials and promptly retired to go into coaching, and this is the start of a new era.

• Hockey: women’s final
  The Netherlands have dominated women’s field hockey for years: of the 15 World Cups they have reached 13 finals and won nine, including the last three in a row; of 16 European championships they have reached 14 finals and won 12, including the last four; and they have reached the last five Olympic finals, winning three. They top both the men’s and women’s world rankings, the latter by a huge margin. It would be a major surprise if they are not involved in today’s two medal games, but can anyone stop them?

Saturday 10 August Day 15

• Volleyball men’s final
  More medals will be awarded today than any other day of the Games, with 39 golds up for grabs including both indoor and beach volleyball. In the former Poland are hoping to finally end their Olympic jinx: they are comfortably top of the men’s rankings and have emerged with two golds and a silver from the last three world championships, but they have not reached an Olympic final since 1976 and in Tokyo lost a fifth successive quarter-final.

• Rhythmic gymnastics group all-around final
  This is a sport easy to dismiss as absurd for the idea of giving medals for glorified hoop-throwing and fancy ribbon-waving, but miss it at your peril. The group event in particular involves stunning displays of athleticism, coordination and synchronisation – it is basically people throwing and catching stuff, but in the most extraordinary ways. An unmissable highlight of the Olympic schedule.

• Men’s modern pentathlon final
  The Olympic motto might be “faster, higher, stronger” but for modern pentathlon the slogan since Tokyo has been “quicker, shorter, less confusing”. The event has been streamlined to the point that what took six hours before now takes just a couple, but if the changes benefit the spectator they haven’t necessarily helped the British reigning champion, Joe Choong, who says he “wouldn’t say they favour me if I’m perfectly honest”.

Sunday 11 August Day 16

• Women’s marathon
  Tradition has it that the men’s marathon should close the Olympic athletics programme, but not this year. At the end of a route that partly follows the women’s march on Versailles, one of the most significant events of the French Revolution, this will be the final medal decided in the Stade de France. Ethiopia’s Tigst Assefa, who shattered the world record last year, will be hoping to improve on her previous Olympic experience: coming fifth in an 800m heat in 2016.

• Men’s water polo
  Though Serbia have won gold at the last two Olympics a three-peat would be a massive achievement given the pure competitiveness of this event – the last four world championships have had four different winners and seven different medallists, with Croatia coming out on top in the latest, in Doha in February. “I have no favourites,” their coach, Ivica Tucak, said. “There is a circle of nine teams from which any can beat any, where every match can be won or lost. Any medal is a magnificent result.”

• Closing ceremony
  There will be no parade of departing athletes here, just – in the words of Thomas Jolly, director of ceremonies – “a great show where only music will resonate”, and of course a handover to Los Angeles, hosts in 2028. The official website predicts that “like an indelible memory, this closing ceremony will be marked by audacity, fraternity and emotion”, and that it will be “an incredible moment of celebration and sharing” in which “the emotion will be immense”. So quite good, then.