“We need to re-enthuse.” This was probably the closest Emmanuel Macron came to a tearful cri de cœur during his latest address on the eve of France’s Olympic Games. It is a reasonable enough statement in itself, although one that may be more accurate with the removal of the “re” part. Welcome to Paris 2024, the 33rd modern Olympic Games, and the first to have basically crept up over your shoulder with a shrug and a pffft and an arch of the brow.
Worrying about the Olympics is of course an Olympic tradition in its own right. The temptation is always there to fret over the scale, the purity, the basic vitality of this four-yearly global anachronism.
This time around there is a potent overlap with generalised Parisian indifference. The Olympics demands as part of its residency a kind of mass state rebranding, looming over its host city, unleashing the destructor ray and turning everything a shade of IOC.
But Paris is already an advert for something. It’s an advert for Paris, a city where two million people spend their days in the ritual dance of being Parisian, where daily life is an act of historic tribute, where the banlieues may surround that beautifully preserved city centre, but they are at least quite a long way away.
Two days out from the summer Games there were muted signs, low-key pageantry and armed police sloping in and out of the cafes, but it feels disposable, like paper bunting at the summer show.
There was even something oddly reassuring about the sombre mood music around the preamble this week. On Thursday the president of the IOC, Thomas Bach, appeared behind a very blank desk and announced in a halting voice that “all the lights are green” but there are still many steady steps to be taken, not so much impresario of the greatest show on Earth as a provincial detective inspector announcing the latest mildly encouraging developments in an ongoing hostage standoff.
On Friday the start of the Games proper will be signalled by Macron’s endlessly compromised imperial parade down the Seine, a show of authentic Parisian joie de vivre overseen by 75,000 security officers, military drones, rooftop snipers and armoured vehicles on the streets. Which is certainly one way of staging a boat show and a Céline Dion gig.
There is at least the promise of some urgency in that opening folie. Because for all its low-key pre-prep this Olympics is also utterly vital to the future of the Games, to the trajectory of Big Sporting Events generally, and beyond that to the cultural geopolitics that have dominated the sporting century since the last time the Games were staged in Paris 100 years ago.
Two weeks to save the Olympic Games. This might seem a little hysterical. The $8bn (£6.2bn) NBC broadcast deal will continue to pump fuel into the moving parts. The sponsor cheques are still vast ($9bn from Coca-Cola: this is a lot of treacly water). But an event that seems to be constantly asserting its own relevance, to be answering, without being asked, the basic question of what it is actually for, does seem to have reached a jumping-off point here. Which way will it fall?
As ever the Olympic paradox comes into play. The Games has always presented itself, with increasing absurdity, as a counterpoint to war and conflict, an arm of international relations, a movement for peace and global unity. Bach has hammed this aspect up before Paris, offering a sickly-sweet vision of hands across the wire, Olympic flowers in the rifle barrel, athletes “living peacefully together under one roof”.
This is a tale the Olympics has always liked to tell. The reality is of course the opposite. The Olympics is an exercise of power, used to project influence and distribute political favour, from Berlin and Mexico City to London and Rio. It is soft power, military rehearsal and shooting without the war.
In return vast revenues are generated, without seeming to find their way back to the citizens who fund the show. And yet we continue to lose ourselves in the spectacle, to allow that glaze to wash over us, because it is visceral, moreish, irresistible in its colours and shapes.
There is a kind of voodoo here, a willing suspension of disbelief. Asked how he would convince remaining Parisian sceptics to embrace the Games, Bach replied: “It is not me who will convince them, but the Olympic flame, when it lights the cauldron.”
And he’s right. Even as this thing has grown more bloated and grotesque, the spectacle will always somehow drown the detail, cost, greed and waste. The question now is how long that can continue to happen? And is it already in reverse?
This time around the threats to Olympic primacy are existential. Most obviously the Summer Games needs to re-establish itself as a dream factory and a producer of moments. The timing of the pandemic has hit hard here. What’s your latest hit? Scroll back and the last really significant Olympic moment was Usain Bolt winning gold in Rio eight whole years ago.
Frankly the Covid Games in Tokyo was a travesty, a ghost ship for the broadcasters, played out in front of empty plastic mega-dromes by frazzled and brutalised athletes. The IOC’s own top-10 moments from the shadow Games are Simone Biles almost suffering a breakdown (and winning bronze), a pair of high-jumpers sharing gold, because, frankly, why not, and no one’s actually here. In a better, saner world it just wouldn’t have happened.
The role of Paris is to fix this. The Olympics always needs more heroes, new moments, new premium human content. The next two weeks are vital to that sense of lost scale. The US in particular has an industrial hunger for Olympic stars. By the end of next week the US sprinters Noah Lyles and the adorable, hyper-talented Sha’Carri Richardson could find themselves elevated into superstardom.
The Olympics needs the Olympics, then. The Olympics also desperately needs a good Olympics. But does anyone else? Two years ago a paper published on the portal ScienceDirect, and subtitled “the rise, crisis and potential decline of the Olympic Games and the World Cup”, suggested that we have already reached “Peak Big Event”, that both the Games and the Fifa World Cup have gorged themselves to bursting, that the only possible outcome from here is contraction.
This makes structural sense. These events are in their own way an arm of old-school western cultural imperialism. The modern Olympics was created out of Europe’s industrial boom at the end of the 19th century, a forum for display and power-flash, presented initially as a world’s fair for science, arts, military power and human splendour. This is one reason why there has never been a clean, apolitical Olympics, why the idea is in itself absurd. And also why the Team GB dressage scandal this week is entirely on point, an example of the absurdity of pouring public money into an inaccessible cultural hangover. Really? This is what the Olympics is still offering?
The world has changed around it, even in the past eight years. The way people consume entertainment has become atomised, less centralised and more sceptical. Even the patrician nature of Olympic presentation – watch canoeing, enjoy the steeplechase, accept these arcane activities – seems increasingly odd in an on-demand world. This is structural too. There are no bidding wars for these events now. People are wise to the costs. Politicians can no longer sell notions of regeneration and guaranteed growth. We know the numbers. We know the carbon cost.
The Olympics is always globalist, imperious, preacherly in its tone, but also a part of a century that has now past. Perhaps with this in mind there is something to be taken from Parisian coolness, from the fact that this low-key Games will cover its cost. The greatest financial gamble is the huge amount spent trying to clean up the Seine, not to mention the imposition by stealth of cycle lanes and car-control by the progressive mayor Anne Hidalgo.
For all its absurdity and excess this is still somehow an unavoidably optimistic spectacle, in its promise and moments of human ultimacy. The show will always go on. But the next two weeks may prove quite significant in defining exactly how.
• This article was amended on 26 July 2024. The NBC broadcast deal is for $8bn not $8m.
