The last day of the Olympic Games falls like the dawn of the morning after the party. A lot of the guests are already in bed, the hosts are starting to stretch and yawn suggestively, and everyone who hasn’t picked up the hint is exhausted, aside from the last few partyhards gathered doing God knows what in the dark corners. Serbia and Croatia were playing a game of water polo, Germany and Denmark had a handball match, there was some bike racing over at the velodrome, and people were heaving weights at the Arena Sud. The bunting had slipped, the shelves were empty, there was mess everywhere, and the cleaning crews were already starting in, getting everything ready to go all over again in the Paralympics.
It was a good Games. Just about everyone agreed on that. Paris rose to the moment, like Céline Dion striding out on to the esplanade of the Eiffel Tower in her shimmering Christian Dior gown to sing L’Hymne à l’amour.
Which is one of a kaleidoscope of images we’re left with from the past fortnight. There’s Antoine Dupont gathering in the ball and setting off on his mad helter-skelter sprint down the wing to give France the lead against Fiji in the rugby sevens final; the great shouts of “Allez!” every time Léon Marchand broke the water on the breaststroke leg of his 200m medley as he swept irresistibly on towards his fourth gold medal; Teddy Riner flinging Kim Min-jong flat to the ground to win his third Olympic title in the heavyweight judo; and the unlikeliest hero of the lot, the 17‑year‑old ping pong prodigy Félix Lebrun, whipping another forehand across the net.
Spin the kaleidoscope lens again, and there’s Julien Alfred running away with the women’s 100m and winning St Lucia’s very first medal, proving there’s room, even now, for an underdog victory in the most over-hyped events. Noah Lyles achieved the seemingly impossible feat of living up to his own expectations by winning the men’s 100m final by just five-thousandths of a second. Simone Biles became the first women to land the Yurchenko double pike, which was immediately renamed in her honour; Femke Bol barnstormed the last lap of the mixed 4x400m relay; Mondo Duplantis waited till his last jump to break his own world record in the pole vault.
And even then you’ve only just begun to cover it. Novak Djokovic finally won the gold medal he’s been chasing after all these years, and did it by beating the greatest player of the next generation. The USA artistic swimming team did an underwater moonwalk; Steph Curry made four three-pointers in two minutes to beat out France in the men’s basketball final. A 35‑year‑old Australian breaker called Raygun improvised an impression of a kangaroo on stage in front of Snoop Dogg, and then called out all the people laughing at her after by telling them: “Don’t be afraid to be different. Go out there and represent yourself, you never know where that’s gonna take you.”
Which isn’t a bad motto for the entire Olympics. From where I was standing, one among the hundreds of thousands here, there was nothing aspirational about these Games. They didn’t involve any multimillion-dollar mega-construction projects, there was a new aquatics centre, which will serve Saint-Denis, and a climbing wall in Le Bourget, but the French didn’t raze any neighbourhoods, or run up any vast new stadiums. The Chinese, British and Brazilians all treated the Olympics as an exercise in showing the world what they could be. The French, unapologetically reconciled to themselves, didn’t seem to be trying to project anything except who they already are.
So yes, they decided to celebrate threesomes with a video skit in their opening ceremony, to have a metal band perform a duet with a mezzo-soprano on the walls of the Conciergerie, and to get a blue naked man to perform a song on a barge full of drag queens in the middle of the Seine. And if you didn’t like it, well, as the spokesperson for the organising committee said with a very French shrug of an apology: “If people have taken any offence, we’re of course really sorry.”
It’s easy to be yourself, of course, when you know you’re so damn handsome. There’s never been a better-dressed Games and, due respect to the next two host cities, Los Angeles and Brisbane, it will be a long while yet before anyone else comes close. Paris did a brilliant job of using its assets, from the fencing under the great glass roof of the Grand Palais, to the beach volleyball arena at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, the equestrian events on the backyard of the Palace of Versailles, and the urban sports in the Place de la Concorde.
The decision to stage the competitions in existing venues, and to encourage everyone to use public transport, ought to be a model of how to hold the Games in the 21st century.
They managed to be in the city, without taking it over. And when it’s all over, there won’t be derelict arenas left behind, no great white elephants squatting unused in the middle of the city, no rickety scaffold towers that need to be turned into slides.
Of course it wasn’t quite as effortless as all that. It takes a lot of work to look this good and, if there was an ugliness underneath it all, it was in the “social cleansing” done in the city centre before everything started. More than 12,545 homeless and migrant people were expelled from Île‑de‑France in the run-up to the Games, and there were reports that more than 150 were being temporarily housed in a gymnasium with papered-over windows in the 20th arrondissement.
That too, felt pretty typical of a city that sweeps so many of its problems under the rug out in the periphery.
The security was overwhelming, and the crowd control could be infuriatingly pernickety, but all that at least meant the Games passed without any major incidents or accidents.
The only thing that blew up was the women’s boxing competition, which, thanks in large part to the International Olympic Committee’s reluctance to take a clear position on the issue and the behind-the-scenes meddling of the Russian‑backed International Boxing Association, ended up becoming another battleground in the culture wars. You guess that, in the circumstances, the French security forces will settle for that.
That’s it, then. The Paris Olympics, sweaty, smelly, chic, spectacular, star-lit and triumphant, are done. Forget all the grand claims about their legacy, don’t worry whether, as the IOC president, Thomas Bach, promised, they helped to bring about world peace. Over and above everything else they were great fun for a fortnight, and gave everyone a brief feeling of community and common interest. Given the state the world’s in, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, that’s enough.
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