What to watch each day at the Paris Olympics

The Paris Olympics will be televised on NBC, USA, CNBC, E!, Golf Channel, Telemundo and Universo. All events will be streamed live on Peacock and NBCOlympics.com. All times Central.

The competition at the Paris Olympics gets underway with eight men’s soccer matches and 12 men’s rugby sevens matches, played throughout the day and throughout France. The U.S. men’s under-23 team qualified for the Olympics for the first time since 2008 and opens against host France in Marseille (2 p.m.).

Some surprising stats about the U.S. women’s soccer team: The Americans have won four gold medals but none since 2012, and they enter the Paris Olympics ranked No. 5 in the world, their lowest ranking ever. The Olympics are new coach Emma Hayes’ first international tournament at the helm, and she declared it time for a new generation when she didn’t select Alex Morgan for the squad. The U.S. women’s national team opens against Zambia in Nice (2 p.m.).

One word thrown around about Paris’ plan for the opening ceremony: audacious. It will be the first Olympic opening ceremony not held in a stadium. Instead, the event will begin with the parade of athletes on boats on the Seine (12:30 p.m.). The flotilla will weave through central Paris for 3.7 miles, allowing more than 200,000 people to watch, for free, from the riverbanks. The parade will stop at the Trocadéro, and the rest of the ceremony will play out with the Eiffel Tower in the background.

The women’s 400-meter freestyle (1:55 p.m.) is the swimming constellation that will bring three of the sport’s biggest stars together: 27-year-old American legend Katie Ledecky, 23-year-old defending champion and world record holder Ariarne Titmus of Australia, and 17-year-old phenom Summer McIntosh of Canada. All three have held the world record in the event. Titmus set the current mark of 3:55.38 last year when the three faced off at the world championships, which was billed as the “race of the century.”

Yes, sure, Anthony Edwards and the U.S. men’s basketball team will be facing Nikola Jokic and Serbia in a blockbuster opening game (10:15 a.m.). But around the same time, you can be awed by Rayssa Leal’s skateboarding on the street course set up at the famed Place de la Concorde. The viral video star from Brazil was just 13 when she won a silver medal in the event’s Olympic debut in Tokyo. Fadinha, or the Little Fairy, has since added X Games titles, world championships, a Pan American Games gold medal and a slew of victories on the pro circuit to her trophy case.

Surfing was added to the Olympics three years ago, and the Paris organizing committee kept the sport in the program and turned it up a notch by staging the competition in Tahiti in the Pacific Ocean, halfway around the world from France. Teahupo’o has been regular stop on the pro surfing tours for decades. Weather and waves permitting, the men’s and women’s surfing competitions begin July 27 and conclude July 30, beginning at noon each day.

So are they really going to be swimming in the Seine? The men’s triathlon, which begins with a 1.5-kilometer swim (1 a.m.), is the first open water swimming event of the Games, putting the water quality of the iconic river under the microscope. Perhaps literally. Cleaning up the river was supposed to be one of the legacies of these Games. But the E.coli levels have been deemed unsafe recently, forcing the organizing committee to come up with an array of backup plans for the triathlons and the marathon swimming event.

Also July 30: Regan Smith vs. Kaylee McKeown in the 100 backstroke

Coached by Michael Phelps’ former coach Bob Bowman, 22-year-old Léon Marchand of France has been taking aim at Phelps’ milestones and is looking to end his country’s 12-year gold drought in men’s swimming. Marchand qualified for four individual events (200 individual medley, 400 IM, 200 fly and 200 breaststroke) and is eyeing four golds. Marchand is favored in the 400 IM on July 28 after obliterating Phelps’ last standing world record last year. But this is the key day for Marchand’s quest: The finals of the 200 butterfly (1:36 p.m.) and the 200 breaststroke (3:08 p.m.) are about 90 minutes apart.

If Simone Biles and Suni Lee qualify for the women’s gymnastics all-around (11:15 a.m.), viewers will get the rare pleasure of watching the last two gold medalists compete at the same Games. American women have won the all-around in five consecutive Olympics, and Biles, returning from two years away, is favored to capture the title again at age 27. Only two gymnasts have won two women’s all-around golds, and none since 1968. Rebeca Andrade, 25, of Brazil, who finished a close second to Lee in 2021, figures to be Biles’ main challenger. She was the all-around world champion in 2022 while Biles was away, and second to Biles at worlds last year.

On this day, medals will start being handed out in tennis (5 a.m.), where matches are being played on the clay courts of Roland Garros, home of the French Open. Novak Djokovic, winner of a record 24 Grand Slam men’s singles titles, has never won Olympic gold. Spain’s Rafael Nadal, the king of clay with 14 singles titles on these courts, plans to retire after this season and is expected to play singles and partner in men’s doubles with young Spanish star Carlos Alcaraz, winner of the French Open and Wimbledon this summer.

Also Aug. 2: Regan Smith vs. Kaylee McKeown in the 200 backstroke

American sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson was poised to make her Olympic debut and be a breakout star in Tokyo until a positive marijuana test kept her from the Games. Three years later, she is the reigning world champion in the women’s 100 (2:20 p.m.) and ran the fastest time in the world this season (10.71) at the U.S. trials in June. Two-time reigning champion Elaine Thompson-Herah of Jamaica will miss the Paris Olympics with an Achilles’ injury. But her teammate Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, also a two-time 100 champion, is back for her fifth and final Olympics.

Because of the Olympics, the Tour de France will not conclude on the streets of Paris for the first time since 1905. Instead, those cyclists will cross the finish line in Nice five days before the start of the Games, and Olympians will be negotiating Paris’ cobbled streets and tight corners, with the women’s 98-mile road race on this day (7 a.m.). The course starts and ends in front of the Eiffel Tower; passes Versailles and other chateaus; weaves through the Chevreuse Valley, a hub for cycling enthusiasts; and features a final climb up Montmartre toward Sacré Coeur.

How high will he go? Mondo Duplantis, a 24-year-old Louisiana native who represents his mother’s native Sweden, is only the third pole vaulter ever to break 6 meters and has raised the world record eight times in the last four years to its current 6.24 meters. Will he hit 6.25 in Paris (noon)? Defying gravity is a theme on the final day of the gymnastics competition, too, with Simone Biles’ last Olympic routine of her career in the women’s floor exercise final (7:20 a.m.) and 22-year-old reigning world and Olympic champion Hashimoto Daiki of Japan on the horizontal bar (6:31 a.m.).

Also Aug. 5: Suni Lee on the balance beam

The Olympics are taking great advantage of Paris’ history by transforming iconic sights into sports venues, including the grounds of the Palace of Versailles, home of French kings beginning with Louis XIV in the 1680s. A temporary arena has been built in the palace’s gardens to host equestrian events and modern pentathlon. Those competing for medals in individual jumping (3 a.m.) will be attacking their obstacles on one end of the Grand Canal with a view of the palace.

First off, it’s artistic swimming now, not synchronized swimming. For the first time at the Olympics, men were allowed to compete in the team event, but no men were selected by the 10 nations that qualified. Instead, the novelty will be in the form of the winner, which will be determined on this day (12:30 p.m.) after the third of three routines. Russia has won every gold medal in artistic swimming since 1996 but is barred from team events at the Olympics because of the invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. qualified a team for the first time since 2008.

It will be a star-studded day at the track, highlighted by Americans Noah Lyles in the men’s 200 (1:30 p.m.) and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone in her signature event, the women’s 400 hurdles (2:25 p.m.). Lyles has only lost the 200 at a major meet once: at the Tokyo Olympics, where he finished third. He is highly motivated to turn that bronze into gold this time. McLaughlin-Levrone set another world record in the 400 hurdles at the U.S. trials, an astonishing 50.65 seconds. She has lowered the world mark by 1.5 seconds in the last three years and spurred talk that she could go under 50 seconds.

Eiffel Tower Stadium, home of the beach volleyball competition, will likely be the most ubiquitous of the tourist-bucket-list-sights-turned-sports-venues during the Games. The reason is right in the name: women’s and men’s teams (including an American one featuring former Timberwolves player Chase Budinger) will compete in a stadium built at the foot of the tower. The sheer length of the tournaments — starting July 27 and concluding with the women’s medal matches this day (2 p.m.) and the men’s the next — means you’ll be seeing that shot of the Champ de Mars “beach” repeatedly on your screens.

Also Aug. 9: Breaking makes its Olympic debut

Gold medals will be given out in women’s soccer (10 a.m.) and men’s basketball (2:30 p.m.), and Eliud Kipchoge is going for his third consecutive gold medal in the men’s marathon (1 a.m.). But let’s give some love to the women’s water polo gold medal match (8:35 a.m.). The U.S. has won the last three gold medals in the sport, and no team, men or women, has won four in a row. The Americans are led by 31-year-old Maggie Steffens, who is in her fourth Summer Games and is the highest-scoring woman in Olympic history with 56 goals.

It is appropriate that the final day of the first Olympics with gender parity among athletes would begin with the women’s marathon (1 a.m.), the first time the women’s race, rather than the men’s, closes out the Games. The route travels from Hôtel de Ville in Paris to Versailles, tracing the path of the women’s march on Versailles during the French Revolution in 1789. It then loops back to Paris to end at Les Invalides, the museum and shrine to France’s military heroes. Gold medals will also be given to women in basketball (8:30 a.m.), volleyball (6 a.m.), weightlifting (4:30 a.m.), wrestling (6:20 a.m.), track cycling (6:15 a.m.) and modern pentathlon (5:40 a.m.) ahead of the closing ceremony at Stade de France (1 p.m.). The athletes will parade again — on land this time — before the Olympic flag is handed over to Los Angeles for the 2028 Games.