Last Friday, July 26, Lady Gaga kicked off the Paris Olympics opening ceremony with a jaw-droppingly gorgeous rendition of Zizi Jeanmaire’s “Mon Truc En Plumes.” And although we’ve yet to get over the *chef’s kiss* performance (the limit truly doesn’t exist for how many times we’ve watched it 🤧), recent intel has emerged in the days since that it was actually prerecorded.

Yep, choreographer and head of dance for the Olympics and Paralympics Maud Le Pladec dished that in order to avoid any potential weather-related issues, the Grammy winner opted to record her performance prior to the highly anticipated event. (FYI, the Associated Press noted on the day of the opening ceremony that Gaga was seen warming up onstage before the ceremony for roughly three hours and then performing for about an hour.)

“Unfortunately, it was the only [performance] that, for safety reasons, we had to prrecord late in the afternoon, once we knew for sure that it was going to rain—we had minute-by-minute updates; we had never watched the weather forecast so closely in our lives,” Le Pladec revealed before adding, “We assessed that it was going to be too dangerous for performers, even with a few drops of rain. [Gaga] wanted to do it absolutely, so we preferred to prerecord it rather than cancel it.”

“The soil would have been slippery. She was wearing heels, very near the water, there were stairs….We had to be extremely cautious,” the choreographer noted, elaborating on the potentially hazardous conditions and explaining that the singer’s four-minute set was easily the “most artistically challenging” of the lineup.

As for where Gaga was IRL during the opening ceremony? Le Pladec also shed some light on that tidbit and dished that the celeb was on site and watched her performance on a screen from her dressing room before returning to her hotel.

Not long after her bit debuted, Gaga reflected on the experience and penned, in part,

“I feel so completely grateful to have been asked to open the Paris @Olympics 2024 this year. I am also humbled to be asked by the Olympics organizing committee to sing such a special French song—a song to honor the French people and their tremendous history of art, music, and theatre…Although I am not a French artist, I have always felt a very special connection with French people and singing French music—I wanted nothing more than to create a performance that would warm the heart of France, celebrate French art and music, and on such a momentous occasion remind everyone of one of the most magical cities on earth—Paris.”

We’re not crying, you are!