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Like every city that hosts the Olympics, Paris designed its opening ceremony to make a splash, with ethereal dance performances, athletes floating down the Seine and a blowout performance by Celine Dion. A big display is table stakes, and hundreds of thousands of people jammed the city’s bridges and riverbanks for hours to cheer the flotilla.
But to make these Olympics truly unique, Paris also had something quieter in mind: It vowed to buck the decades-long trend of spending a dizzying fortune on hosting them.