Follow our Olympic coverage of the Paris Games.
The Olympic Games have had a tough decade.
For so many people over the past decade, the five multi-colored rings, long synonymous with the pinnacle of sport, have become the symbol of billions in wasteful spending, similar excesses of political and moral dissonance and a dismantling of the very idea of the Games as pure competitions. played for spirit and country.
Each cycle, the Games encountered a new set of problems: Russia’s annexation of Crimea and use of a systemic doping program at the 2014 Sochi Games; the threat of the Zika virus and the unprecedented disorganization in Rio de Janeiro in 2016; the threat of nuclear war in South Korea in 2018; the depressing images of empty stadiums due to the coronavirus pandemic in Tokyo in 2021 and Beijing in 2022.
Empty stands due to the COVID-19 pandemic took the shine off the Tokyo Games, which were also postponed for a year. (Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images)
At the same Beijing Games, organizers and the International Olympic Committee were often asked about freedom of expression and the treatment of ethnic minority groups such as the Uighurs, a situation that the United Nations later described as crimes against humanity, which easily conflicted with the set values. of the Olympic Games.
With each dent, television audiences in the United States turned away in significant numbers, threatening one of the largest sources of Olympic revenue.
Now comes Paris. One of the most important tourist destinations in the world, a city that evokes levels of fascination and romance that few if any can surpass, will take on the task of restoring during the Olympic Games that mythical quality that has made it possible for so long to exist as something so important. more than sports.
That quality may always have been more myth than truth. Crude commercialism has helped turn the Olympics into a multibillion-dollar behemoth on par with the remarkable sports festival that last took place in Paris 100 years ago. Still, Paris has promised to bring back the shine.
“I’ve been an athlete and I like the pressure,” Tony Estanguet, a three-time gold medalist in canoeing and chairman of the Paris 2024 organizing committee, said last fall during a visit to New York. “How can we push the line and be more creative and innovative? The success of the Games depends on this ability to evolve and make the brand, this event, more attractive. It is a permanent fight.”
The IOC, the Swiss-based organization with about 100 members that owns the trademark of the famous rings and awards the Games to cities competing to hoist them, has been losing that battle lately for a variety of reasons. One of these was the lack of geographical diversity, with the previous three Olympic Games in East Asia.
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To change that, the IOC has changed its bidding rules in recent years to take a more active role in targeting cities rather than simply selecting from among the candidates that present themselves. After Paris, the Olympic Games go to Northern Italy; Los Angeles; the French Alps; Brisbane, Australia; and Salt Lake City. Organizers hope this will help revive lagging interest in Western Europe and America.
“I have no doubt that moving the Games to such an iconic European city as Paris, plus getting fans and partners back in person, will be such a necessary and welcome boost,” said Michael Lynch, a leading international sports consultant and the former director of sports marketing for Visa, one of the main sponsors of the Olympic Games.
The French, for their part, have entered the battle in the most French way: by showing off their beautiful capital. Estanguet and his team decided years ago, when they first bid for these Games, to combine sport and culture like never before by hosting the Games in some of the most famous and recognizable locations in and around the French capital.
The move is a stark turn from the plan most cities followed when they hosted the recent Olympics. That playbook usually involved finding a huge, undeveloped or long-abandoned area and building a huge park full of sports facilities, usually somewhere outside the center of town, and erecting a large fence around it.
Paris has done a bit of that with its Olympic Village, where athletes will live, in St. Denis, north of the city center and not far from the Stade de France, where athletics will take place. The aquatic centre, where diving, water polo and artistic swimming are offered, is also nearby.
Just about everything else is in or just off the perimeter road that surrounds the main part of Paris, which you can traverse on foot in an afternoon with a comfortable pair of shoes.
As the sun sets behind the city on Friday evening, the opening ceremony will take place along the Seine, with some 10,000 athletes floating down the river on boats rather than marching to a closed, remote stadium. Beach volleyball takes place on the Eiffel Tower. The fencing will take place in the Grand Palais. Breaking, skateboarding and 3×3 basketball take place near Place de la Concorde. The equestrian competition will take place in Versailles.
Beach volleyball in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower will be one of the visual spectacles of the Paris Olympics. (Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images)
In addition to creating a two-week commercial for Paris, organizers want to reimagine what the Olympics can be by bringing them closer to population centers rather than transferring them to a remote area. It’s especially poignant after Tokyo and Beijing, two consecutive versions of the Olympics held in silos like never before, with COVID-19 prompting organizers to ban paid spectators.
The consequences were ugly, especially in the United States, where the size of the television audience declined for NBC, whose media rights fees represent about 50 percent of Olympic television revenues. Coverage from Beijing fell 40 percent in 2022 compared to South Korea in 2018, which was lower than Sochi in 2014. Coverage from Tokyo in 2021 was 42 percent lower than Rio in 2016.
Michael Payne, the IOC’s former marketing director, said audiences have grown elsewhere, especially in host countries in Asia, but after a few “challenging Games”, in his words, Paris offers the chance for a “reboot”.
“It would be good to get back to normal,” Payne said with Olympic understatement.
There is no guarantee for that. As wonderful and novel as Friday’s opening ceremony may seem, clouds hang over the Games, as they always do in this era.
Russia, long one of the key countries in the Olympic movement, remains a pariah nation due to its history of state-sponsored doping and its invasion of Ukraine. Athletes from Russia and Belarus will compete as part of a neutral group of athletes with no national ties.
Israel’s war in Gaza, a major response to deadly Hamas attacks last October, has sparked calls to ban athletes from Israel and led to demonstrations at Israel’s first men’s soccer match Wednesday.
The threat of a terrorist attack looms, especially since so many events will take place in the center of Paris.
The global anti-doping system, which relies on independent national organizations to test their athletes, has broken down. COVID-19 numbers are rising. As people from all over the world converge on Paris, the city could become the ultimate petri dish, especially the Olympic Village, where the athletes will live, eat and socialize for the next seventeen days.
David Wallechinsky, a leading Olympic historian, said he walked 10 miles around Paris this week looking for some pre-Game buzz. He couldn’t find it. Yet he knows that everything changes once the competitions start, the stadiums fill up and the host country wins its first gold medal.
Wallechinsky also knows one thing for sure.
“It will look good,” he said of the Paris Games.
Estanguet wants more than that. He knows the world will be watching.
“The pressure is positive for me,” he said. “We must succeed.”
Equestrian events will take place in front of the Palace of Versailles, one of many sporting weddings and an iconic location at the Games. (Pierre-Philippe Marcou/AFP via Getty Images)
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletics; photo of the Eiffel Tower: Maja Hitij / Getty Images)