How Mission: Impossible prepared Tom Cruise for Paris Olympics closing ceremony stunts

Hollywood star's handover will go down as one of the most spectacular and riveting in the Games' history

Tom Cruise takes the Olympic flag to Los Angeles on a motorbike during the closing ceremony. AP

Tom Cruise had an epic part to play in the conclusion of the Paris Olympics and his entire filmography seems like it was preparing him for that very moment.

During Sunday’s closing ceremony at the Stade de France, Hollywood’s most prolific action star abseiled from the roof to receive the Olympic flag as part of the official handover to Los Angeles, the next host city. He was given the flag by the city's mayor Karen Bass and American gymnast Simone Biles.

Footage then showed Cruise racing across Paris on a motorbike bearing the Olympic flag, passing by the city’s landmarks including the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. He then drove into a cargo plane, answered a phone call and replied: “I’m on my way.”

And that was just the midway point of the mission. In the video's next segment, Cruise leapt off the cargo plane and parachuted into a clearing near Los Angeles to the energetic charge of Red Hot Chili Peppers’s By The Way. Cruise then sprinted up a hill, to where a heavy-duty toolbox was hidden, before unravelling the fabrics inside and clamping them with carabiners on steel railings. With his work seemingly done, he then sprinted off to a meeting point where he handed off the Olympic flag to American cyclist Kate Courtney.

The camera then zoomed out to show Cruise standing in the famed Hollywood sign, revealing that the fabrics he clamped were to modify the landmark to bear the multicoloured Olympics logo. It marked the end of Cruise's involvement in the video, as the Olympic flag made its way across Los Angeles with cameos by several notable US athletes and the Red Hot Chili Peppers themselves.

The handover will go down in Olympic history as one of the most spectacular and riveting. Yet, for Cruise, it was just been another day at the office.

The stunts were very much in line with the feats he has performed in his Mission: Impossible films. After almost three decades of playing Ethan Hunt, Cruise continuously ups the stakes across the franchise’s seven films, performing stunts with increasing danger and awe.

Let’s not forget that this is the man who scaled Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011). In the follow-up Rogue Nation (2015), he held on to the side of an Airbus A400M as it took off and climbed to around 300 metres. In Fallout (2018), he performed a Halo (high-altitude, low open) jump, waiting until the very last minute to open the parachute. For that stunt, Cruise famously completed 106 skydives with the broken ankle he sustained in a previous stunt to nail the scene.

In Dead Reckoning, Cruise perhaps performed his most dangerous stunt to date, which brought together elements from various other feats. He drove off a steep and lofty cliff on a motorcycle before parachuting to safety. Again, he performed the stunt several times to perfect the one used in the film.

So with an oeuvre that will make even the most seasoned Hollywood stuntman envious, Cruise is one of the few industry figures who had the mettle and the experience to give the Olympics handover segment its wow factor.

However, while Sunday’s stunt was a spectacle in its own right, Cruise’s involvement was, much like the plots that Hunt finds himself embroiled in, simply a matter of calling the right man for the job.