A lot could go wrong in the last few weeks before the greatest show on earth. But wait. Maybe it won’t.
There’s chaos in Paris as the 100-day countdown to the 2024 Olympics starts. Isis has threatened an attack. The Seine – hosting the opening ceremony and triathlon swimming – has e coli. French public service workers have issued strike notices for the whole fortnight and World Athletics has broken with the spirit of the games by offering $50,000 prize money to track and field gold medal-winners on the grounds they play a “crucial role”.
So what? There’s more. In what’s looking like the most politicised games since the Cold War, Palestinian and Israeli athletes will compete under their flags while Russian and Belarussian athletes won’t be allowed flags or national anthems.
And yet. So what indeed. Every Olympic Games tends to be in crisis as the opening ceremony approaches. Former Olympics minister Hugh Robertson showed the IOC the London 2012 facilities at the height of the 2011 riots. Athletes were calling on Tokyo to cancel the games in 2021 with two months to go. Is Paris ready?
Mais oui:
- Construction has been delivered largely on time and under budget. The games have come in at €9 billion, comfortably below Tokyo, Rio and London and a fraction of Beijing’s $52.7 billion.
- 95 per cent of the venues already exist – the Stade de France will host athletics, Roland Garros tennis and boxing, beach volleyball will be under the Eiffel Tower, fencing at Versailles and surfing in … Tahiti.
- 50km of new cycle lanes and an extension of metro line 14 connecting Orly airport and the athlete’s village to the centre of Paris will be ready.
Au contraire:
- Paris remains the tourist capital of the world and 15 million visitors are expected over the summer. Mayor Anne Hidalgo says the transport system “will not be ready and there will not be enough trains”.
- Line 16 from the Stade de France to the press centre in Le Bourget won’t be ready until 2026.
- Eco-building policies mean new Olympic buildings won’t have air-con, and Paris is due a summer heatwave.
Safety first. With active threats from Isis and President Macron’s strong anti-Putin stance exciting Russian hackers, France has asked Poland, the UK and Germany to send police to help secure the games alongside 45,000 French police and gendarmes, 20,000 private security guards and 18,000 troops including the light cavalry 4e régiment de chasseurs. Also present: AI security cameras, Reaper surveillance drones, AWACS airspace-monitoring planes, fighter jets, airborne-refuelling planes and helicopters with sharpshooters and drone-disabling radar guns.
Then the clown. The opening ceremony is being overseen by Thomas Jolly, a theatre director who trained in expressionism and clowning. It starts with a floating parade of 180 boats on the Seine carrying 10,500 athletes from the Austerlitz bridge to the Trocadéro for the final show. Premium sponsor LVMH has delivered medals designed and made by Paris jeweller Maison Chaume. Sephora will partner the torch relay. Louis Vuitton is providing the medal cases and wines and spirits are from Moët Hennessy.
Arnault’s games. LVMH, currently Europe’s largest company, paid $160 million to be the games Premier Partner. The deal, overseen by LVMH boss and world’s richest man Bernard Arnault, went to the wire at the Elysée Palace. “The only representative of the state that Bernard Arnault sees is the president of the republic,” one source told Le Monde. Arnault got a good deal. The games needed a budget boost with a year to go and gave him control over virtually all the advertising space in the city, plus oversight of the opening ceremony – with an expected one billion viewers, it’s the perfect product placement opportunity.
What’s more… The chance to swim in the Seine has been a broken promise of French presidents 1990 (in practice it’s been illegal since 1923 thanks to deadly heavy metal pollution). Macron renewed the vow in March, but the five Seine swimming pools he pledged won’t be ready by July.
More than 70 countries are holding elections this year, but much of the voting will be neither free nor fair. To track Tortoise’s election coverage, go to the Democracy 2024 page on the Tortoise website.
