When, in 2017, Paris won its bid for the 2024 Olympics, the International Olympic Committee was desperate for a host. After decades of saddling other cities with lopsided deals and catastrophic debt, the international sporting congress of Lausanne was finally reckoning with the housing crises it had created, finding few mayors and ministers eager to welcome its games. Budapest, Hamburg, and Rome had dropped out of the running earlier in 2017. Rio’s facilities from the year before were already starting to fall apart, a citizens’ revolt had tanked the first American bid in Boston, and the new “NOlympics” movement in Los Angeles attacked the very foundations of the games. From a softball field outside Athens overgrown with weeds to a kayak slalom in Beijing glutted with trash, the ruins of a modern Olympia were now scattered over four continents. No one wanted them in their own suburbs.
But Paris has a unique history of taking big swings with the five rings. This would not be the first time the French took it upon themselves to save the event: they had, after all, been at the heart of its original revival. As far back as 1796, the revolutionary French republic considered organizing its calendar around a four-year “Olympiade Française,” culminating with dances on the Champs Elysées and races on the Champ de Mars. The neoclassical concept didn’t stick, but the celebrations went forward anyway as the jeux républicains, and over the years a national myth of having invented the first modern “Olympiades” endured. Still, it took several tries over several centuries to get the games right. The first call to establish the international Olympics, in Paris in 1892, fell on deaf ears; it was only at the amphitheater of the Sorbonne, two years later, that Pierre de Coubertin found the right mise-en-scène to sell the idea. Even then, the Paris Olympics of 1900, appended to the city’s Exposition Universelle, were little more than a sideshow, retitled the “International Competitions in Sport and Physical Exercise.” Ice skaters were officially listed in the fair’s cutlery exhibition, and some athletes only discovered belatedly that they’d been involved in anything Olympic. A few ideas did endure, inspiring tributes in this summer’s games—the beginning of women’s events, some swimming in the Seine, and a ballooning contest—but the general program was a fiasco. It was Paris 1924, after the interruption of World War I and the disorder of Antwerp 1920, that redeemed the city’s role as a rénovateur. Alongside star performances by the Flying Finn Paavo Nurmi, Uruguayan soccer star José Andrade, and future Hollywood Tarzan Johnny Weissmuller, Paris 1924 also featured an unprecedented “Grand Season of Art.” Performances at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées featured a Jean Cocteau collaboration with the Ballets Russes, while Igor Stravinsky, Maurice Ravel, Paul Valéry, and John Singer Sargent joined more than a hundred other high-culture celebrities to award medals in the Olympic Art Competitions. The Olympics, then, owe their original existence and their ongoing prestige to Paris’s legacy of artistic experiments—but experiments need to fail before one finds a winning formula.
After the 1924 games, Paris lost five bids to host the Olympics again. When it finally won the contract to construct its centennial, it seemed to most that the gig was not worth the trouble. It took French athletes and officials to convince mayor Anne Hidalgo that they could learn from the mistakes of rival cities like London, which had bested them in 2012. Even at a cost of $10 billion, this summer’s Olympics are cheaper than the last three summer games. After London set the previous record for containing carbon emissions, Paris vowed to cut that footprint in half.
The key strategy at play is what Hidalgo called the “compact games.” To avoid overpromising on “legacy” architectural projects that would only add to the world’s surplus of single-use, single-sport stadiums, Paris would rely instead on existing spaces in the center-city. It helped that there was already a long-term urban revitalization plan in progress: since 2014, the “Reinventing Paris” campaign had begun work to clean the Seine, block out new bike lanes, and attempt to set a global standard for the fifteen-minute city. Accordingly, these would be the thirty-minute Olympics, housing athletes in a mix of sustainable apartments and future public housing within a half-hour’s metro ride from the competitions. Ninety-five percent of those competitions would take place in preexisting facilities or pop-up structures that could be dismantled and reused.
Of course, this was a carefully crafted public campaign, written to justify costs that had expanded by 115 percent since the original bid and to cover over controversies that had flared outside the capital. The protest group “Le Revers de la médaille” (“The Other Side of the Medal”) documented how, for nearly a year before the games, police had engaged in evictions, street sweeps, and forced busing to clear neighborhoods of migrant populations for the arrival of Olympic guests. In Tahiti, officials overran protests by locals in Teahupo’o and built a judging tower for surf competitions by breaking right into the reef.
It was an open question as to what kind of crowd—or mob—would turn up in the capital for these compact urban games when they finally arrived. Scheduled amid the pandemic and political protests, Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022 had been marked by their empty seats; Paris was at risk of a disaster of its own when Emmanuel Macron, six weeks before the games began, called snap elections that threatened to split the host nation in three. In the final pre-Olympic weeks, the mood in Paris was reminiscent of 1796: the Place de la République had been overrun first by jubilant citizens celebrating the victory of the left in the parliamentary run-off, and then by a “Counter-Opening Ceremony” calling Olympic officials to account. Reports insisted, meanwhile, that most Parisians would be happiest simply escaping the mayhem for a couple of weeks. It may have been too late: on July 26, the morning that the games would open, a coordinated arson attack on four major train lines into the capital prevented nearly a million passengers from traveling through the country. Security forces had been otherwise occupied by sweeping every apartment that overlooked the Seine.
“The silliness of operetta, of marble, of the chic, of sport can easily meld together and form a whole.” So wrote Cocteau in the stage directions for his Olympic show in 1924, Le Train Bleu. Like this year’s ceremony, Cocteau’s was conceived as a waterside spectacle, with a parade of dancing athletes crossing before an ensemble of swimsuited spectators. “Les poules. Les gigolos. Bain de soleil. Course (sur place)”: cruising chicks and playboys in modern bathing wear, designed bespoke by Coco Chanel, running in place in a procession that pulled at the very idea of a unifying thread. At the raising of the curtain—an enlarged replica of Picasso’s neoclassical Race, or Two Women Running at the Beach—Cocteau wanted to both elevate and “ridicule” the poses of polychrome sporting postcards. “These ensembles always have a military side,” he mused, in a concluding stage direction for Scene I. He demanded instead that his bathers emerge from cubist changing rooms and strike up provocative poses. “But one needs to throw such stupidity in sharp relief against the most beautiful statues.” The free associations invited by an Olympic stage—to be classical or modern, patriotic or pluralist, devoted to tradition or youth, eris or eros—strained against chances of cohesion.
I thought of Cocteau while watching Thomas Jolly in La Grande Seine, the behind-the-scenes documentary for Paris’s Opening Ceremonies. Selected to put on his own Olympic show in August of 2022, Jolly—avant-garde director, puckish polymath, and heir to Cocteau’s moniker as a new “Frivolous Prince”—invited ideas from his own ever-widening circle of choreographers, costumers, writers, and composers. In the documentary, the screenwriter Fanny Herrero describes how the Olympic writer’s room riffed on the French revolutionary motto, adding “sororité” to “fraternité,” “universalité” to “égalité,” and—at the heart of it all—counterposing “réalité” against “cliché.” Jolly, true to character, contributed “pluralité” and “complexité,” and appended yellow sticky notes adorned with these nominalizations to an enlarged map of the Seine. Before long, among the fluorescent squares that assigned theatrical and conceptual blocking, one could hardly see the river or the banks. If a viewer thought (as I did) that this was merely a brainstorming session—a literal exercise in throwing things at the wall to see what will stick—they had missed the writing on said wall. This had become a committee project, and it was committed, even aesthetically, to absolute inclusivity. They were going to do it all.
The result looked a lot like those sticky notes on the map. The July 26 ceremony was creative and colorful, and also overcrowded and tacky. Over the course of four hours, athletes and their television audience floated from the Pont d’Austerlitz to the Trocadéro past twelve stations of increasingly theoretical, Frenchified abstraction, from “Enchanté” to “Eternité.” If there had been any debate as to whether the hosts would steer away from the stereotypes expected of them, novelist Leïla Slimani (another star of the ceremony’s literary committee) gave the final verdict. “A cliché is also a fantasy; Paris is also its clichés,” she said. “We wanted to play with that.” The ceremony’s first segment featured a winged accordionist playing Edith Piaf’s “La Foule,” a pre-recorded Lady Gaga stepping through a clunky cabaret impression of Zizi Jeanmaire, and poorly hung pink posters inviting visitors to a Ville en Rose. Roving among them, the mysterious hooded torchbearer seemed to represent either the Phantom of the Opera, the Man in the Iron Mask, or Arno Dorian of Assassin’s Creed (a French-produced video game, and one of Jolly’s favorites). NBC’s Mike Tirico referred to him only as “the individual”—as though this was Baudelaire’s “perfect flâneur,” the symbolic spectator amid the throng, the “prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.” (Walter Benjamin’s addendum, in the Olympic context, takes on an especially sportsmanlike cast: “We may discern the image of the fencer in it; the blows he deals are designed to open a path through the crowd for him.” But here I am making my own projections, falling into Slimani’s trap.)
The show teetered between silliness and “Solennité.” The ongoing reconstruction of Notre Dame inspired a memorable percussive musical score with dancers hanging off the cathedral’s scaffolding, but only before the tribute to Paris’s craftspeople turned to an advertisement for Louis Vuitton. Aya Nakumura blazed down the Pont des Arts, melting down the gold of La Monnaie and the preciousness of the Academie Française into her own coinages and bars, but only before the Republic Guard circled awkwardly behind her. An energetic heavy-metal concert by Gojira at the Conciergerie, its windows decorated with decapitated Marie Antoinettes, reminded us that we were in the city of revolutions, but only before a cheaply constructed model of the city’s coat of arms wheeled into frame and spoiled the scene. An artfully animated sequence of portraits leaving their frames to run around the Louvre ended with the Minions stealing the Mona Lisa.
Every opening ceremony, of course, cobbles together incongruous elements. For all its mass ornament, Beijing 2008 also featured a bilingual pop theme; for all its self-deprecating humor, London 2012 took itself seriously enough to sing William Blake’s “Jerusalem” while showing off its “green and pleasant land.” But those ceremonies still had a unifying theme and feel, as did Athens 2004 (with its living art-historical frieze) or Rio 2016 (with its ecological minimalism). You could tell that Paris didn’t know what story it was telling when Zinedine Zidane passed the torch to young kids who then passed it to “the individual” who then passed it back to Zidane. At that final moment, at the Trocadéro, you expected the mask to come off and reveal the athlete who would light the cauldron, but instead the flame went back down the river to the Louvre with Rafael Nadal and an international entourage—probably to kill time, so that the other athletes could disembark from their boats.
The real party of Paris 1924 had been the “Bal Olympique.” One hundred years before Jolly’s ceremony, the expatriate Union of Russian Artists in Paris hosted an underground avant-garde costume ball poking fun at all things Olympic, with a copy of Manet’s Olympia and a reservation at the Olympia Tavern. The impossibly long guest list promised attendance by Man Ray, Matisse, Marinetti, Mayakovsky, and Metzinger (among the Ms alone) and invited others to join in varied states of undress and cross-dress. In some ways Jolly’s overstuffed ostume ball felt more like a tribute to this soirée than to Cocteau’s Olympic ballet: in place of a crocodile costume by Fernand Léger, Jolly’s animated tribute to the sewer crocodile Eleonore; in place of Tsuguharu Foujita shuffling about as a female wrestler, drag-queen Nicky Doll strutting in metal armor.
It was composer Victor Le Masne who paid the closest attention to the legacy of 1924, and his own musical themes saved the centennial show from complete incoherence. Whether reprising Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies, which had also featured at the Bal Olympique, or stringing together his own athletic anthems, Le Masne found leitmotifs that unified the French character of the four-hour cycle. His song “Parade” shifted from keys to choir to a house beat, combining the best of pre-game pop with a night out in Bastille. It’s only because it rained on his “Parade” that the ceremony struggled at first to find its energy, but the music cues told us what this show was supposed to be: a city-wide riverside party, the kickoff to a summer festival, a carnival of remixes and mashups. Lost amid the pearl-clutching and the backpedaling (and worse, the hate messages and the legal suits) over the catwalk sequence on the Passerelle Debilly was the fact that DJ Barbara Butch had also been spinning her own soundtrack for the middle of the show, and that it killed. You could feel it in the energy of the athletes who passed under the footbridge, waving and dancing in their plastic ponchos.
2024’s costume ball ended on its highest note. After a dozen French athletes carried the torch through the Tuileries, two of them revealed the penultimate surprise of the show, lighting a cauldron in the shape of an enormous hot-air balloon—a tribute to the first montgolfières of the 1780s—which then rose about 200 feet above the city. When Celine Dion—appearing after a four-year silence occasioned by her rare diagnosis with stiff person syndrome—appeared on the Eiffel Tower to sing “Hymne a l’amour,” it felt as though she was transforming Piaf from a tongue-in-cheek cliché (as she’d been at the ceremony’s start) into the best of color commentators. It was a perfect comeback for the singer and for the show, walking us back from the ridiculous to the sublime. It also left the audience with a defiant final statement. The sky had indeed collapsed on Paris, and some of Jolly’s best-laid plans had crumbled on the way, and yet: “Peu importe si tu m’aimes / Je me fous du monde entier.” I don’t give a damn what the world thinks. Never mind, so long as you love me.
From the starting gun, this summer’s Olympics looked different from anything we’ve seen in the television era. In the first hour of competition, horses trotted out for dressage through the scalloped topiary of Versailles while fencers entered their bouts by descending the Art Nouveau staircase at the Grand Palais. At the Champ de Mars, the beach volleyball net drew a direct sightline to the Eiffel Tower, and judokas hit the mat across from the Ecole Militaire. Here there was also a further innovation: judo, wrestling, and their paralympic counterparts would all take place at a “Grand Palais Ephémère,” a temporary (“ephemeral”) replica of the structure built in 1900, for the Universal Exposition that coincided with Paris’s first Olympics. Whereas temporary Olympic structures have been a problem for past hosts—turning expensive edifices into abandoned “white elephants” after the games are done—architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte built this particular tribute out of modular pieces, which will be disassembled and reconfigured in the fall. This is surely the future of the games, but it is also a tribute to their past. From the beginning of the Olympic movement, Coubertin wished that the events would fit in proportion and harmony with their surroundings—a principle he called “eurythmy.” The ideal Olympic rings are concentric: athletic events ought to take place inside fitting architectural frames, nestled inside fitting civic surroundings.
This was the logic behind structures all over the city. By using simple metal bleachers and canvas coverings, Paris could also make use of its world-famous landmarks, along with its public squares and parks. Archers took aim in front of the gold dome of the Invalides; a single basketball hoop for the 3×3 halfcourt tournament cast its own obelisk shadow at La Concorde; and triathletes used the Pont Alexandre III in triplicate, diving into the Seine below before returning to the bridge on bikes and on foot. Not every experiment was destined for success. After a century-long ban on bathing in the Seine and a decade-long effort to divert sewage from the water, the river passed safety tests only minutes before the first swim. The test results were more than a little suspicious: when triathletes arrived at the finish line, Canadian Tyler Mislawchuk was there vomiting. Competitors from Switzerland, Portugal, and Belgium came down with stomach infections in the following days, and initial training sessions for the swimming marathon were canceled in the coming week. This left competitors underprepared for their 10-kilometer race, when, realizing they were swimming against the current, they had to find a more efficient inside-track along the bank, only to get ensnared in vines. Hungarian Bettina Fabian pointed out that it was hard to focus on your pace anyway when you were primarily worried about not swallowing the water. (She brought pálinka brandy from home as an antibiotic.)
Still, as microscopes pored over bacteria levels, cameras were soaking up the wide shots. With the sun now shining on the city’s iconic attractions, the bleachers were packed, and, after the images of empty stadium seats in Tokyo and Beijing, it was energizing to see thousands of faces beaming over every event. All the way up the steep grandstands of the Grand Palais, spectators and French tourists dressed as musketeers to celebrate their swordfighters; every day, more than 20,000 of them filled the “Champions Park” at Trocadéro to cheer musical acts and victorious athletes. Everywhere you turned, you saw tricolor flags and cardboard cut-outs of French faces; you heard “Allez les Bleus” and the Marseillaise. Casting aside the clichés—that an audience of the French could only be arbiters, and not fanatics—the home crowd sported an unexpectedly cheesy sincerity in donning its coxcombs and phrygian caps.
In a city where the crowd has been endlessly theorized, it was time to simply throw yourself in. This, too, was reminiscent of a shift that took place around 1924. In the early decades of the 20th century, Paris crowds had once haunted locals and visitors alike: Guillaume Apollinaire thrust his lovelorn reader “all alone amid the crowd,” Hope Mirrlees populated the Champs Elysées with ghosts of “the famous dead,” and Benjamin described the universal initial response to the throng as “fear, revulsion, and horror.” Recoiling from the “viscous tide of humanity” at carnival time, Rilke’s narrator Malte Laurids Brigge complains, with little sense of irony, “Someone threw a handful of confetti in my eyes, and it stung like a whip.” But when Paris hosted the Olympics in the Twenties, something changed: as part of the Grand Season of Art, the Montparnasse playwright Géo-Charles imagined the international crowd as a democratic chorus, Cocteau put an ensemble of eager sporting spectators on stage, and Jack Yeats painted himself amid his fellow Irish republicans watching The Liffey Swim.
These surges of participation and international goodwill, then as now, are presumably why we carry on with the Olympic boondoggle to begin with. At the same time, the sheer size of the crowd points to the ways that Olympic hosts continue to fall short of this idealism. The most common problem plaguing Olympic cities in recent years is how to welcome the world for a two-week stay without sweeping everyday asylum seekers out of sight. Paris did better in this regard than Beijing or Rio, but its numbers still don’t add up: the city built new apartments to house 6,000 people, but forcibly relocated double that population in the process. In the run-up to the games, television reporters told us stories of houseboat residents on the Seine who were asked to sail downstream to make way for the ceremonies (with tickets as compensation), but not the stories of the mass evacuations happening around the less scenic turns of the river. As the experimental urban games got going, their undeniable success was also, at times, an indictment. Watching the city accommodate millions of fans, foreign and French, in creative new civic structures, what we saw was evidence that sufficient logistical planning and political will can start to solve housing crises otherwise described as intractable. If the I.O.C. is serious about reforming its charter, and if it wants to justify its continued power, it needs to do more than allow cities to reuse sporting structures: it needs to plan for the adjoining, smaller structures, where the hosts actually live, such that every new event no longer forces an eviction. The cultural and civic impact of the Olympics is what lasts, after all, even if we judge them by their sports.
But the sports, to be fair, were as beautiful as ever. If you stuck to NBC’s “Primetime in Paris,” you were mostly confined to the kind of coverage that dominated the old broadcast days—at the pool, the gym, and the track—but even here there were glimpses of something new. When the expected storylines scripted for Katie Ledecky, Simone Biles, and Noah Lyles worked out largely as expected, what set these events apart from previous editions were small touches of spectacle added to the surroundings, rather than the last landing of the floor routine or the incredible photo finish of the men’s 100 meters. At the track, Lyles roused the crowd first with his dramatic leaping entrance from the tunnel, and then by ringing the victors’ bell that is destined for the towers of Notre Dame. At the gym, the bronze-medal men and the gold-medal women ran out onto the Quai de Bercy to start their celebrations on the southeast side of the Left Bank.
Even tuning in on TV you felt as though you could move around the thirty-minute city with ease, catching a range of events that had never been properly broadcast before. In the US, an average of 34.5 million viewers tuned in over the first three days in Paris—a 79 percent increase over Tokyo. Maybe, like me, you caught your first shoot-offs in men’s archery or the women’s 25-meter pistol (set to the opening beats of Daft Punk’s “Around the World”), or you stayed up to see which photo would make it for Maria Taylor’s “Hang it in the Louvre” segment on “Late Night in Paris.” As in the ceremonies, so on the screen, not every experiment was well-conceived—nobody asked for an AI-generated “Olympics Recap” featuring the disembodied voice of Al Michaels—but there was a bit of everything for everyone. Exhaustive scrollers and streamers trying to flit from sport to sport had their own physical avatar on the scene: Snoop Dogg was our everyman everywhere all at once. One day he was taking a dunk with Michael Phelps, joking about his lung power; the next he was with Martha Stewart at Versailles, teaching us the difference between “piaffe” and “passage.” For an amateur among experts, his commentary ended up as some of the best of the stretch, with his freestyle riffs voiced over BMX highlights (“you mean he’s two-wheelin’ and dealin’ and gold-medal fulfillin’?”) and out at the Stade de France for the steeplechase (“we’re about to get to dippin’, rippin’, ride and slippin’”). In the final days, he stepped out from NBC’s coverage onto the Olympic stage itself, opening the breaking tournament at La Concorde—the new event of the summer.
As for the true event of the summer, there is a singular standout. Fans of Team USA will remember record-breaking wins for Biles and Ledecky, Lyles and Sydney McLauglin-Levrone; fans rooting against us will toast breakthroughs for Rebeca Andrade of Brazil and Julien Alfred of St. Lucia. But the contest that most fully captured the distinctive spirit of Paris 2024 was the one that took over the whole of the city at the midpoint of the games. The women’s cycling road race was a veritable Tour de Ile-de-France, starting in the middle of Paris, traveling southwest out to Rambouillet, and returning to the Pont d’Iéna: a circuit of 158 kilometers. “The crowds are absolutely massive already this morning,” reported Steve Schlanger, as bikers swerved by spectators packed onto the sidewalks near Notre Dame. “It’s going to be crazy when they get back this afternoon.” Sure enough, three hours in, the cyclists returned to the Rive Droite, where fans of every flag were hanging over the barriers and out of their apartment windows. The final challenge was a triple loop around Montmartre, a “cobbled ascent” in the city’s northern hills. In the lead were the Dutch favorite Marianne Vos, neck-and-neck with the Hungarian Blanka Vas, with a chase group about eight seconds behind them. Hanging in that second pack, wearing number 33, was the American Kristen Faulkner, a latecomer to cycling who had only been added to the road race a few days prior as a late replacement for teammate Taylor Knibb. Now, with 10 kilometers to go, she was in the hunt, passing Sacré-Cœur for the final time.
“What a scene,” Schlanger barked. “The canvas could not be more spectacular here in Paris today. A backdrop of all-time in cycling at the Olympic Games.” Faulkner pedaled behind another major favorite, the Belgian Lotte Kopecky, and briefly overtook her at the Opéra Garnier; in the courtyard of the Louvre, she took a decisive lead; on the Pont du Carrousel, she closed the gap behind Vos and Vas; and across the river, she surged into an all-out sprint down the Quai Voltaire, finding open space in one of Paris’s public bike lanes to race past the Orsay and into the lead. Schlanger was shocked, but he found the line that fit the scene: “In a city of artists, this is a true avant-garde performance by Kristen Faulkner.” No one would catch her. With a final lead of 58 seconds, Faulkner wheeled into the Park of Champions, where, for once in the whole Olympic fortnight, the celebration space had some empty rows. We’d already seen where the tens of thousands of spectators were: they were cheering all along the streets of the city.
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