Olympic Games in Paris: Revolution or same old story?

From mid-July to early September, Paris is hosting well over ten thousand athletes and twice as many journalists — first for the Olympic Games, then the Paralympic. Just like every four years, we could have heard a lot about new, groundbreaking lessons learnt from previous organizational failures. The main slogan, almost directly taken from the campaign of Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris, is to organise ‘the greenest Games ever’. But it is not just the idea of environmental neutrality that resounded loudly. The organisation of the competitions has had a long-standing bad reputation, influenced by their social costs, the immaterialising profits of the events, the lack of which has led the hosts into a debt loop, or their devastating impact on the urban fabric. The current Games are not only to be branded with an ‘eco’ label, but also to open a new chapter in the history of the Olympics’ impact on its social and natural surroundings — the competitions are to adapt to them, rather than influence them to change drastically.

The politicality of the Games is not limited to Paris or organisational issues, but extends to a broad international context. The Games are marked by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and war crimes in Palestine, which have rendered the Olympic truce meaningless. The slogan of this year’s Games, Ouvrons grand les jeux (Games widely opened) can really sound like an unfunny joke.

The XXXIII Summer Olympics is the third such event in the history of French sport, but organisers have assured that it would be “the biggest event ever organised in France”. In June 2015, Paris officially announced the start of its bid to host the event. At the time, an unexpected situation occurred – Paris and Los Angeles, competing to host the 2024 games, came to an agreement between themselves. The International Olympic Committee — or IOC — announced two more hosts at the same time. Why?

Despite the Games enjoying an audience in the billions and millions of visitors flocking to the event itself, few cities want to host them.

Twelve cities competed to host the 2004 event, Athens won. Ten cities competed to host the 2008 ones, Beijing won. Only nine cities wanted to host the XXX Olympic Games, with seven and then five potential organisers entering the subsequent competitions. Only two applied for the 2024 events. Who would be interested in the upcoming events? In fact, this is not the first time that the Olympic movement has been in crisis. Right from the very beginning, despite the considerable success of the first Olympics in 1896, it encountered problems in the preparation of subsequent events. The hope for a breakthrough came at the end of the Second World War and the harnessing of sport by the world’s superpowers to the Cold War political struggle, of which the German Olympics of 1936 were somewhat infamously the inspiration.

Was there the breakthrough? Not exactly. In 1968, ten days before the inauguration of the Olympics in Mexico City, the city was shaken by brutally repressed demonstrations in which several hundred people were killed. A few years later, in 1972, eleven Israeli athletes were killed by terrorists in Munich. These events proved that the organisation of the Olympics could be a politically risky endeavour, casting doubt on the very idea of the Olympics in a world so remote from ideals of healthy competition and the peaceful resolution of disputes.

The second problem is, of course, money. From the first modern Olympics until the late 1960s, competitions were held in major American and European cities that already had existing infrastructure. Between 1956 and 1972, the number of athletes competing more than doubled, thus forcing the development of sports infrastructure. Montreal, which hosted the XXI Summer Olympics in 1976, incurred such enormous costs as a result that it took the city as long as thirty years to settle the bills. The controversy over the financial demands imposed by the IOC was so great that the idea of the Games came into question. Which led to Los Angeles negotiating the use of already existing infrastructure for the event in 1984.

Increasing demands

The lessons of the 1980s and 1990s, however, did not influence subsequent IOC decisions. At the start of the new millennium, the list of demands from the committee grew steadily, to which the response was a gradual decline in the — initially large — number of applicants. The hosts of the Games were saddled not only with the construction or renovation of pitches and halls to match the glamour of the event, but also with the development of hotel and infrastructure provision. Meanwhile, revenue from the Games did not grow at the same rate as expenditure.

The world’s biggest sporting event has become profitable in specific cases in another dimension: political, becoming an element of strategic communication for emerging countries. The best example of this was the 2008 Beijing Games, which, from today’s perspective, provided a spectacular prologue to today’s global Sino-US rivalry.

However, there have been more such events — in this key, one can read, for example, the 1988 Seoul Games or the 2004 Athens Games, the momentum of which, according to experts, indirectly led to the 2007-2008 debt crisis.

The rising costs of the Games were opposed by the authorities of the potential host cities, but not only by them. In recent times, it has also been the residents of the cities themselves who have opposed the organisation of the Games. When we see today’s images from Paris, unfit for life for the male and female residents who suddenly found themselves in a thicket of barriers and anti-terrorist security, the potential future actions of the residents opposing the organisation of the Olympic Games by their cities gained further arguments. The current flagship example of anti-Olympic action is No Boston Olympics, an action organised in a city that was considered the favourite to bid to host this year’s Games.

In their campaign, city activists drew attention to the undemocratic nature of the process by which the city authorities decided to participate in the pre-Olympic competition. They pointed to dangers ranging from terrorism to pollution, organisational and transport problems, but also the inaccessibility of the Games to the majority of the population and the privatisation of profits while collectivising losses.

At the end of the day, it would be the city, not the government or others, that would fund the Games in the first place. The agreement with the IOC clarifies it that local taxpayers would be responsible in the event of cost overruns. No Boston Olympics activists managed to convince 53 per cent of residents – and Boston withdrew from the competition. The decision triggered an avalanche. When Boston’s mayor dropped his bid, Rome, Hamburg, and Budapest also dropped out of hosting the Games. In the end, only Paris and Los Angeles remained. Hence, the decision to nominate two cities at once.

A new approach

Has Paris succeeded in proving that the Games can be more beneficial to the urban fabric? A key aspect of the Paris edition was a return to the 1984 model, i.e. a reduction in investment in new sports infrastructure. The organisers relied on upgrading existing facilities. This was to help avoid situations known from the Athens or Montreal events, i.e. city debt and costs spiralling out of control.

According to the Paris authorities, 95 per cent of the sports centres in use are facilities already embedded in the urban fabric. These include the Stade de France, opened in 1998 — suitable for football, rugby, mass events but also athletics — or the Vélodrome National de Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (2014). The jewel in the crown is the Georges Vallerey swimming pool, originally built for the 1924 Olympics and renovated twice: the first time in the 1980s and the second time before the current event. For this year’s Games, it is the venue for swimming training, to then become a public pool, accessible to all Parisians.

New infrastructure includes the 8,000-seat Porte de la Chapelle arena and the Olympic village in the working-class Seine-Saint-Denis district. The former will be transformed into a concert venue and the home of the Paris basketball team, while the latter will become a residential area. However, it is the second project that is attracting media and expert attention. SOLIDEO, the public body responsible for preparing the Olympic Games, has promised that the Olympic village will leave a lasting legacy in a working-class area where 25 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line. After the event, the infrastructure is to be transformed into a new neighbourhood with space for 6,000 residents. It will include service and office space, cultural and sports facilities, a school and a 3.5 hectare park.

Despite limited costs, this year’s Games have prompted the authorities to invest in the city’s transport network. The Paris administration has extended two metro lines and one suburban train route, which is expected to facilitate access to sports venues and serve residents after the Games. As part of these projects, Paris-Orly airport, one of the international airports in the Paris region, will now be directly connected to the city centre via a metro line that is key to the Games, connecting various venues including the Aquatics Center, Stade de France, Place de la Concorde and Bercy Arena.

Another huge infrastructure project was the clean-up of the Seine, which winds through Paris and has long been synonymous with dirt and pollution. To clean the river ahead of the competition, the city invested €1.4 billion in the construction of a mega-treatment plant designed to store sewage and prevent it from entering the river. This did little to allow some Olympic training and competitions to be held in the Seine and then returned for use by the public. However, heavy rains in June, less than a month before the event, caused the system to overflow, resulting in untreated sewage entering the river and making the Seine once again unswimmable.

In order to convince Parisians of her efforts, the mayor of the city, Anne Hidalgo, together with a group of daredevils, organised an event in mid-July, during which it was possible to swim in the river — along with her. However, despite her assurances, the river was not swimmable in time, leading to the mixture of cancellations and normal training or competition, after which swimmers complained about the water quality.

Success?

The entire Paris sport feast is expected to cost around €11 billion, which is a significant increase from the anticipated €8.2 billion. The event will still be significantly cheaper than the 2020 Games in Tokyo — which cost $28 billion — or London 2012, which required £14 billion to prepare. It ranks far behind the most expensive Games in history, with Sochi 2014, which cost $55 billion to host. One question remains: will Paris manage to make money from the Games?

Olympic Games revenue is generated primarily by two main entities: the local organising committee, this time Paris 2024, and the IOC. For the last summer Games in Tokyo, the IOC received a total of USD 7.6 billion between 2017 and 2020/2021 — at this point it should be recalled that the 2020 Games, scheduled for 2020, were postponed by one year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this case, media rights accounted for 61 per cent of revenue, and The Olympic Partner’s corporate sponsorship programme, known as TOP, established in the 1980s, accounted for 30 per cent respectively. Since the 1990s, broadcasting fees have more than quadrupled to a total of $4.5 billion for Tokyo. During the same period, TOP’s revenues have increased from less than $300 million to $2.3 billion.

As for local committees such as Paris 2024, their main sources of revenue are national sponsorships, ticket sales, national licences, and the aggregated ability to capitalise on the event itself and the side events. The IOC spends 10 percent of its income on internal activities and distributes the rest through a so-called solidarity programme, aimed at local organising committees, and therefore National Olympic Committees, International Federations and other relevant sports promotion initiatives.

It is worth noting here that this revenue-sharing system is crucial to the survival of certain sports, especially those rather considered elitist and enjoying a long but unpopular history, such as fencing.

Whether the Games formally make a profit — in the case of Paris, we will have to wait a little longer for this judgement — their supporters argue that they leave a positive economic legacy. An independent study advertised by the IOC and conducted by the Centre de droit et d’économie du sport (CDES) shows that the Paris Games will generate between $7.3 billion and $12.1 billion for the city and the surrounding Île-de-France region between 2018 and 2034.

The main sources of net profits are expected to be tourism (30 percent), construction (28 per cent) and the organisation of the event itself, from which profits are expected to account for up to 42 per cent of total revenue. According to the study, public spending of US$3.3 billion will generate a multiplier effect of three — hosting the Olympic Games will generate economic benefits three times the original investment amount. The study takes a 2018-2034 perspective, recognising that it is only in these years that the impact of the overall capital injection can be fully seen. From the start of the Games to the end of the Paralympics, Paris is expected to welcome between two and three million visitors, who will spend €2.5 billion at the event.

However, not everyone agrees with such an optimistic outlook. There are claims in the local press that sports tourists will displace other visitors who would have come to Paris — one of the world’s most popular holiday destinations — anyway. At the same time, many industries, from small boutiques to luxury goods shops to taxi transport, could lose out on the Games because of traffic restrictions, bringing a decline in the number of potential customers.

As for the question of data showing the impact of the Games on the urban fabric and the environment, we still have to wait. It is true, however, that the worst consequences of the event were borne by the most vulnerable. As the New York Times described in its report earlier this month, and left-leaning French media before that, before the Olympic Games, French authorities began a mass deportation of homeless people, often literally nowhere. Displaced people claimed they had been promised accommodation elsewhere, but instead were sent to strange streets far from their homes or, if they were immigrants, received deportation notices.

Often these were peoples from Saint-Denis, the neighbourhood where the current Olympic village is located. Apparently, those on the margins of society, showing its limitations and weaknesses, did not fit in with the majesty of the French nation, which President Macron said was to be honoured by this year’s competition.

Heritage

According to the French president, the Olympic period was to be not only a celebration of France, but also a time of stability and rest, an Olympic peace in domestic politics, which was to be a direct reference to the ancient prototype. From today’s perspective, looking at the powers of the President of the Fifth Republic, it seems certain that the presidential camp’s plan for a snap parliamentary election, surprising everyone, was drawn up with the current period in mind. Even if everything had gone according to the organisers’ and the president’s ideas, he still cannot count on a relaxation in domestic politics. Opposition on both sides of the political dispute is growing.

Moreover, the event has been accompanied by a succession of image blunders, from the sabotage of the railway on the day of the Games’ inauguration, to the aforementioned cleanliness of the Seine, the controversial inauguration to say the least, to the poor accommodation of athletes in the Olympic village. However, with terrorist threats predicted, such a state of affairs for the beginning of August seems satisfactory from the perspective of French politicians. Politicking on domestic issues, however, covers up the fact of the extraordinary politicisation of the current Games by the event organisers themselves.

In January, the IOC announced that athletes from Russia and Belarus would only be allowed to compete in Paris if they did not represent their country or an organisation affiliated to it and did not actively support the war. This stance raised a storm of doubt about how the committee decides who can compete, especially in the face of the horrific conflict in Gaza.

As of this moment, more than 39,000 people have been killed by Israeli forces — according to the Hamas-administered Gaza Ministry of Health — while at the same time many human rights organisations and UN agencies are reporting increasing health problems for civilians, including a growing polio epidemic. The publication of one of the oldest scientific journals, the Lancet, stated that more than 180,000 people may have already died in the fighting and as a result of the collapse of civilian infrastructure in Gaza alone. Added to this is the increasing violence in the West Bank, by illegal settlers and the army, as described by the International Court of Justice, or prosecutors of the International Criminal Court. 

The Israeli media and statements by flagship politicians are full of messages normalising violence, torture, and rape against the Palestinian population. On the night of 29 July, far-right militias, among them armed rebel soldiers and far-right politicians currently ruling the country, invaded a military base during the Games in which Israeli representatives are taking part. All to ‘protest’ against the detention of nine soldiers accused by the military prosecution of rape and torture of a detained Palestinian.

The opposition speaks of an attempted coup, foreign commentators of a mutiny in parts of the armed forces, or a repeat of the US version of 6 January in Israel, thus losing the bigger picture: in Israel there is institutional consent to the mass murder, torture, and rape of detained, often illegally without charge, members of the Palestinian people, simply because of their origin.

At the same time, Israeli athletes are representing their country at the Paris Games. Admittedly, their participation is met with protests from athletes or the public, being a slander to all other participating teams and to the very idea of the Games. The IOC is the sole arbiter in this matter, which means that decisions to exclude certain countries from events are entirely within its power.

Russia’s exclusion was largely welcomed by the international community. Similar moves have been seen in the case of other international competitions: from the UEFA Champions League to the Eurovision Song Contest. In this case, we see that international law and equality before it, according to some, only applies to selected states and their ruling teams.

Certainly, an overall assessment of the legacy of the XXXIII Summer Olympic Games will have to wait a little longer. At this point, however, we can conclude that they may be simultaneously one of the most controversial, or at least the most discussed, Games in the history of the Olympic movement. On the one hand, because of the approach to international issues presented, which can only become more drastic with the passage of time, and on the other, already more optimistic, because of the changes carried out within the very idea of their organisation. The question is which of these legacies will go down in history.

Cover photo: a sport site arranged around the famous Invalides complex. Source.

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