Maybe it’s the effect of the global post-Covid rebound. Maybe it’s a collective reprieve from the doomerism of our ecological and political end times. Maybe it’s simply a reflected orgasm of the Parisian streetscape, the sense of occasion created by young athletes at the peak of physical health sweeping across this metropolis-sized monument to early-modern bombast. But for whatever reason, these Olympics have sparkled like no other Games in recent memory. A city given over to revolutions, occupations, copulations, and decapitations, in a country without a government, has come thrillingly to life for the Olympics – and nowhere has Paris shone more brilliantly than on the world’s TV screens.
The Olympic Games are always a media event as much as a sporting one, of course, and this edition is no exception. But thanks to the advent of streaming and the organizers’ inspired decision to convert Paris into a single, city-wide stadium – to make the city, as much as the athletes, the star of the show – the 33rd Olympiad has arrived at a perfect moment to create the ultimate sports media spectacle. Volleyball by the Eiffel Tower; fencing in the Grand Palais; swimmers leaping into the Seine under the gilded Fames of the Pont Alexandre III; treacle-coated horses zig-zagging in the shadow of Versailles like members of the Sun King’s court dancing a Sarabande; that Canadian guy emptying his guts at the end of the triathlon: truly, these Olympics have felt more vivid, more memorable, more saturatingly epic than any other Games this century. Even those events held away from the Parisian sights have projected a basic monumentality: from the crepe-thin margins in the men’s 100m and Femke Bol’s thundering finish in the mixed relay to the agony of the medal-denying dong, all the podium contenders in Paris have seemed to respond to the drama, history and scale expressed by the city around them.
