Slovak Deputy Prime Minister Tomáš Taraba says he’ll skip the closing ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics due to the “repellent symbols of deviant decadence” he claimed to have witnessed during Friday’s opening ceremony.
The extravagant show staged along the Seine River in the French capital at one point featured drag queens and a man in blue body paint intended to represent Bacchus, the Greek god of wine, reclining on a platter of food. Christian organizations in France, the United States and Russia said the performance had insulted their religion by riffing on a famous depiction of the last supper.
While denying any intention to offend, Olympics organizers on Sunday apologized. Thomas Jolly, the event’s artistic director, told French 24 hour news network BFM that the performance wasn’t meant to insult Christianity.
“You will never find in me a desire to mock and denigrate anyone,” Jolly said.
Taraba, who was to have represented his country at the closing event on August 11, posted on Facebook that the organizers of the event had “prepared for the world a disgusting exhibition full of LGBTI ideology and insults to the symbols of Christianity.” He did, however, note that organizers had “apologized to Christians around the world for the offense they caused.”
Taraba, who also serves as environment minister in the Cabinet of left-populist Prime Minister Robert Fico, was elevated to power following last year’s Sept. 30 election on the ticket of the far-right Slovak National Party (SNS). Fico, who before 1989 was a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and later founded the social-democratic Smer (Direction) party, has over the past decade increasingly espoused nationalist, pro-Russia and anti-West positions that have brought him into the orbit of far-right forces in Slovakia.
Taraba was previously elected to parliament in 2020 representing the radical People’s Party Our Slovakia (ĽSNS).
“I was supposed to represent Slovakia at the closing ceremony,” Taraba continued. “But this Olympics will forever be remembered in the normal world … for abusing the beauty of sport and turning it into progressive political theater.”
“For this reason I have decided not to attend the closing ceremony.”
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