The latest news concerning the ongoing train derailment operating under the name “2024 Olympics” is that a key element of the opening ceremonies was as bogus as everything else in this misbegotten venture. It seems clear that the opening song sung by Celine Dion was in fact lip-synced.

That’s the assertion of Fil, a longtime professional musician who runs the popular YouTube channel Wings of Pegasus.  (And whose haircut reveals a healthy admiration for the early 70s.)

Dion, likely selected due to her Quebecois French ancestry, opened the Olympic ceremonies by singing "L'Hymne à l'amour," a classic Edith Piaf song from the 1950s. The song was written by Piaf as an elegy for her deceased lover Marcel Cerdan, a professional boxer. An apt choice for the Olympics.

Dion, who has had it rough in recent years, was highly praised for her performance.  MSN stated, “Celine Dion emerged, singing notes as clear and brilliant as Cartier jewels,” while NBC asserted, “Dion delivered a breathtaking rendition of "L'Hymne à l'amour" ("Hymn to Love"), leaving many speechless during the Opening Ceremony at the 2024 Olympics.” Praise of this level was pretty much universal.

All except for Fil, who had his suspicions. His YouTube channel is largely devoted to analyzing musical performances across the entire range of popular musicians going back seventy years or more. In recent years he has been conducting an individual crusade against the tsunami of fakery (autotune, lip-syncing, etc.) overwhelming live music. Fil knows fakery when he hears it.

In his first video addressing Celine Dion’s performance, Fil used pitch analysis software to scrutinize Dion’s isolated vocal track. He quickly discovered that many of the notes lay precisely on frequency, something very unlikely with the human voice, which “does not do this naturally.” His conclusion was that the track had been subject to pitch correction, not through autotune, which is done live, but by an engineer in a studio.

Needless to say, this ignited a firestorm. Fil was inundated with protests, insults, and open threats from Dion’s vast global fandom. (I recall the same thing happening with Streisand fans when I was a kid.)

In response, Fil produced yet another video taking the analysis to another level. Along with the ceremony itself, Fil examined an amateur recording of a previous rehearsal of the same song. Graphically matching the vocal lines, Fil demonstrates that they are identical. Not only do the two lines largely match, when one drops out due to background noise or fading, the other perfectly fills in the blank spots.

There’s absolutely no question. Despite protests from Dion’s musical director and pianist, among others, the performance was a recording, with Dion lip-syncing during the ceremony.

That’s one for Fil.

This is not to blame Celine Dion, who has been battling poor health recently, but the Olympic committee who thought it was a smart idea to put her in a stress-filled situation she wasn’t able to master. So… we’ve got drag queens attacking Christianity, people forced to swim in an open-air sewer, young girls being beaten by men twice their size, and now this. It makes you wonder how it can get worse.

But of course it will. This is the French we’re talking about.

Image: AT via Magic Studio