Newly elected French president Emmanuel Macron arrived at the International Olympic Committee’s Lausanne headquarters for meetings on a wet July Monday in 2017 with an air of, “OK, now we can get started.”
“A little audacious,” a member of the French delegation said of Macron’s entrance to Le Monde.
But Macron, then 39 and the youngest French president in history, knew his audience. IOC president Thomas Bach views himself as not just head of a worldwide sports organization, but also a major global geopolitical player. And so Macron, a “Paris 2024” pin attached to the lapel of his power navy blue suit, the full presidential entourage in tow, had come to the shores of Lake Geneva to kiss the five rings.
Macron hit all the right talking points, extolling the “values of peace, freedom, tolerance that the Olympic movement illustrates, embodies so wonderfully.”
“That is what I came to defend,” he pronounced.
He was an attentive listener as Bach led him on a tour of the Olympic Museum at the end of which a charmed Bach declared, “The Paris 2024 bid is underway.” Never mind that Paris’ bid to host a third Games had been officially launched two years earlier.
At one point Macron and Bach posed for photographers, shaking hands next to an eternal flame with a statue of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the Frenchman who founded the modern Olympics, looming behind them.
“I have come to support a candidacy built with great ardor,” Macron said.
As the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad formally begin Friday with an opening ceremony on the Seine, a major question mark hovers over the IOC after a decade of controversial and scandal-ridden Games: Can the 19-day competition and Games Macron has tied himself so closely to revive passion for the Olympic movement with the public, potential corporate sponsors and future bid cities?
Can Paris deliver on the ardor, the enthusiasm Macron promised that day in Lausanne and provide a springboard to the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles? Or will the Olympic flag Mayor Karen Bass brings back to Los Angeles on August 12 represent a further diminished Games?
“It is really clear and the IOC has been looking to really reboot the Olympics and using Paris and Los Angeles to redeliver some real relevance,” said David M. Carter, a sports marketing professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business and founder of the Sports Business Group, a sports and entertainment consulting firm. “So I think appropriately there’s been a lot of emphasis on the ability of Paris to pull off these Games and really for a variety of reasons, like the postponements from COVID, the revenues really haven’t been where they need to be. Clearly the number of cities that have wanted to bid on the Games over the past decade has dropped while expenses have gone up, politics have prevailed. It’s really important that they pull off these safe and revenue producing Games. Not necessarily profitable but at least not take a huge loss when they pull it off.”The reboot, it’s making them must-see television, it’s making them financially feasible.”
Full of star power
The Paris Games, the first Olympics held outside a COVID-related lockdown since 2018, certainly won’t lack for star power.
There will be once in a generation — maybe once in a lifetime — talents. American hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone might be the greatest athlete on the planet. Period. The 24-year-old has a range that track and field has never seen. She would be a gold medal contender at 200 and 400 meters, a medal threat in the 100 meter hurdles and the 800. In Paris she will focus on defending her 400 hurdles Olympic gold medal and continuing to take the world record to places once considered unimaginable. McLaughlin-Levrone broke the 52 and 51 second barriers and her most recent world record, 50.65 at last month’s Olympic Trials, her fifth world record in three years, suggests another barrier could be broken.
“She can run 49,” Dalilah Muhammad, the 2016 Olympic 400 hurdles champion, said.
Simone Biles, the most transcendent Olympic athlete of her generation, returns to the Games to reclaim the individual all-around title after a gymnastics version of vertigo known as “The Twisties” prevented her from doing so in Tokyo.
There will be historic quests. Kenya’s Eliud Kipchoge is attempting to be the first person to win three consecutive Olympic marathon titles. U.S. swimmer Katie Ledecky looks to add to her seven Olympic gold medals, already equal to most ever by a female swimmer.
And there are local heroes. France’s Leon Marchand, a five-time NCAA champion at Arizona State, swept the 200 and 400 medley titles at the last two World Championships adding a 200 butterfly gold at last summer’s Worlds. Victor Wembanyama, the NBA rookie of the year, is a big reason why the prospect of a France vs. Team USA gold medal showdown has made the basketball final the most sought-after competition ticket of the Games.
But some of the biggest stars of these postcard Olympics will be the venues themselves.
“History dripping from the setting,” said Rick Burton, a Syracuse sports marketing professor and the former chief marketing officer for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee.
Beach volleyball will be played against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower, fencing will take center stage at the Grand Palais, the Trocadero will anchor road cycling. Equestrian events will be at the Chateau de Versailles. The marathon course starts at the Hotel de Ville, turns for home around the Versailles palace and finishes near the Esplande de Ivalides. Most dramatic of all will be the opening ceremony featuring a flotilla of boats carrying athletes westward along the Seine at sunset.
A “moment of beauty, art, celebration of sports and our values,” Macron said.
“So many places and moments that combine the history of France (the role of Paris as a capital, the monarchy and Louis XIV, the modern Paris of the Belle Époque, that of Pierre de Coubertin) and the history of sport,” Paul Dietschy, professor of contemporary history at the University of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, said in an email. “If all goes well, these will be aesthetic Games.”
Burton said his hope is “Paris will prove and set the table marvelously for LA in that Paris will give us the historic Games and not only of (1900 and 1924 Paris Olympics) but also Paris being a world capitol of the last 500 years. And then four years later you will go to Los Angeles and it will be Hollywood and technology and it will be this wonderful build out on everything I think Paris will deliver on in ’24 and allow (LA 28 chairman) Casey (Wasserman) and the group that is building 2028 to say, ‘OK, they killed it with history and grandeur of a European capital and we’re going to kill it now with the things that we’re good at.’”
The Paris and Los Angeles connection
Paris and Los Angeles were awarded the 2024 and 2028 Games in 2017 at a time when the IOC was in “a total (full)-blown crisis that no one, or fewer and fewer cities and countries and populations want the Olympic Games,” said John J. MacAloon, a University of Chicago professor who has written extensively on the Olympic movement and was a member of the 2000 IOC commission that reformed the bidding process.
Despite Bach’s tongue-in-cheek comments about the launching of the Paris bid, Macron arrived in Lausanne knowing that Paris was a lock to host the 2024 Games or at the very least the 2028 event after the IOC executive board a month approved a month earlier the unprecedented move of awarding of the next two available Summer Games at the same time with Paris and Los Angeles the only two cities still standing after a bid process in which bankrolling the Olympics was repeatedly rejected by voters and local governments across Europe and North America.
Eight cities had pulled out of bids for the previous two available Olympic Games with no viable host city candidate for the 2028 Games appearing on the horizon. Four cities — Boston, Rome, Budapest and Hamburg — pulled out of the 2024 bidding with Toronto officials deciding against even entering the race.
“Everyone was scared off,” said Victor A. Matheson, a Holy Cross economics professor who specializes in the economic impact on sports. “That’s the great story with Paris and LA. After all the bidders dropped out, especially the ones where any voters were involved. Because voters love the Olympics but they hate paying for them. We had Boston drop out which is how LA got the U.S. bid. We had Hamburg, Munich on the winter side, all these winter and summer hosts drop out and, of course, it comes time to award the Games to France, comes down to LA and Paris and they gave it to Paris but they were worried they wouldn’t get anyone for 2028. So they said, ‘Is there any way we can give you 2028 right now?’
“And so LA won the 2028 Olympics without there actually being a bidding process for 2028. I mean that’s enough right there. Again not a gigantic competitive bidding process for Brisbane in 2032 and the last two Winter Games that they’ve just announced is the same sort of deal. They didn’t say hey, let’s do a cattle call, let’s do it like the opening of Walmart on Friday morning, Black Friday and all the customers storm into the building with chaos of multiple bidders and everyone trying to outbid one another. They didn’t have that.”
Potential bid cities haven’t been the only ones skeptical. McDonald’s, for decades one of the IOC’s top sponsors, decided not to renew its deal with the IOC after the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro. Toyota announced that it will not renew its sponsorship with the IOC worth a reported $835 million after the agreement expires later this year. According to a Japanese news agency, Toyota officials said the money was “not used effectively to support athletes and promote sport.”
By awarding Paris and Los Angeles the 2024 and 2028 Games at the same time, MacAloon said, bought the IOC “time that it desperately needs to rethink the whole situation.”
The challenge of breaking even
While Sochi and Beijing reported revenues of $53.15 billion and $52 billion for the government subsidized 2014 and 2022 Winter Olympics, respectively, of the last 10 Summer and Winter Olympics held in non-authoritarian nations, six have finished in the red with a combined deficit of $4.9 billion. A seventh Games, the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, reportedly broke even.
The last seven Games have averaged 158.7 percent overrun from their original budget, according to an Oxford University study earlier this year.
“You think about Sochi through Beijing and Tokyo there were a lot of issues there,” Carter said. “I think a big part of it is the political element of it and I think it’s really hard to compare one Olympic Games to another because when you talk about the Games in Russia or China it’s really about the global positioning of the political brand as much as it is the financial responsibility attached to hosting the Games. They’ll host at any cost because they’re looking at it as a marketing expense for their country. Whereas Paris and LA are looking at it and putting pencil to paper and making sure these are vibrant Games and people want to watch and attend and sponsors want to invest in and advertisers want to be a part of. But you have to do it with some measure of fiscal responsibility, so it’s really hard to compare one games to the next.
“One way to look at it is these will be the first games in a long time where there won’t be an asterisk next to it saying delayed, postponed, geopolitical concerns, whatever it might be. It’s a sort of back to the way you used to think about the Olympics from a business standpoint, which is this exercise in following the money. And that money is flowing from, when we think about Paris and LA, really coming in from your broadcast partners and your corporate sponsors. And if you look at the IOC level, you’ve got so much of that money coming from those two buckets that it’s really pretty amazing. And that amount of money is not going to go down. Look at all the controversy we’ve had and yet the revenue from the broadcast and sponsorship continues to grow. I think to LA, if you look at the LA 28 budget, you’re still looking at 65 percent of it coming from sponsorship and ticket sales. So for LA to be successful, and this is why we see LA 28 focus, not solely, but in large measure, in getting the sponsorship pieces in place. And it is not going to be the case with Paris or LA that you can simply say, ‘Well we came up deeply in the red but that’s OK because we built our brand for LA and Paris, two countries that don’t need major events to drive tourism or notoriety.”
The latest reported costs for the Paris Games are at $9.7 billion, less than any of the previous four Olympic Games, summer or winter. French taxpayers are projected to pick up between $3.26 and $5.44 billion of those costs, according to French national audit officials.
Besides security, one of the biggest items in the Paris budget was a $1.5 billion multi-year cleanup of the Seine, polluted for decades by the flow of industrial waste and sewage.
“Everyone has been conscious of every euro that is spent, that it is useful, and we should be careful not to spend any euros on things that are superficial,” Etienne Thobois, the CEO of the Paris 2024 organizing committee, recently told reporters. “Frankly, that is a challenge in itself.
“The target (around making a profit) is always to be balanced. We’ve always said we will spend only what we can generate in terms of revenue. The target is not to make money. The target is just to deliver a spectacular Games and to do it on a balanced budget. That’s the aim.”
It’s a target future potential bid cities and corporate sponsors as well as sports economists will be keeping an eye on.
“Top of the radar is the final bottom line number on how much spending they engage,” Matheson said. “It’s looking like they’ll keep it under $10 billion and that’s the first time that’s happened in like two decades.
“If they’re at like $8.5 billion right now and the final number comes in at $11 (billion), that’s not great because that’s like everything was going fine and then it got away from us at the end. On the other hand, if it really does come in under $10 (billion), that’s looking pretty good for LA in four years. Because LA might even be able to come in under what Paris is doing.”
Paris’ bottom line will be helped by the selling of an Olympic record 8.6 million tickets generating $2.83 billion.
Will Parisians embrace it?
But success at the box office is not necessarily an accurate reflection of a Parisian’s view of the Games.
“Since the 2024 Games were awarded to Paris, France has had a problem because it doesn’t know how to ‘sell’ the Games to its population,” said David Roizen, a specialist in sport public policy and the Olympics at Fondation Jean-Jaures, a French think tank aligned with the Socialist Party. “In fact, it is not in control of its ‘narrative,’ it is subject to media events: the price of tickets, transport problems, pollution of the Seine.
“This situation has not contributed to making the Games popular. Opinion polls attest to this. However, since the arrival of the Olympic flame in Marseille at the beginning of May, something was beginning to happen in France. Local populations were out in force, celebrating the passage of this Olympic symbol close to home.
“With the shock of the dissolution, Emmanuel Macron broke all that.”
On June 9, Macron dissolved the National Assembly triggering a nationwide snap election, the first round on June 30, the second round July 7.
“Why ruin this beautiful moment?” Anne Hidalgo, Paris’ socialist mayor said.
Hidalgo said Macron’s decision was “another move I am having difficulty understanding.
“Like a lot of people, I was stunned to hear the president decide to do a dissolution. A dissolution just before the Games, it’s really something that is extremely unsettling.”
Hidalgo wasn’t alone.
“Our country is facing an unprecedented political situation and is getting ready to host the world in a few weeks,” Gabriel Attal, the country’s prime minister and like Macron a member of the Renaissance Party, told reporters.
Anxiety was further heightened when National Rally (RN), the far-right nationalist, anti-immigration party led by Marine LePen, won 33.2 percent of the vote in the first round with a pro-Macron coalition finishing third with 21.2 percent.
“In fact, the fear of a far-right government in France swept through all the news, including Paris 2024,” Roizen said.
But in the second round, France’s left-wing parties denied RN a majority in the Parliament’s lower house.
“It is clear that he has made a political error firstly towards his voters, who considered it an irresponsible act,” Dietschy said. “He is no doubt relieved because the Macronist vote has not collapsed, the RN came third and the left-wing coalition is very divided. It will be very difficult to govern France and in the history of cohabitations, it is always the president who has benefited even if he cannot stand for re-election in 2027. It’s clear that since the European elections, the attention paid to sport, i.e. the Olympic Games, but also the Euro, has dropped considerably.
“But now that the situation has calmed down and we’ve entered the holiday period, interest in the Games is returning. Paris broke the Atlanta 1996 record for ticket sales. In fact, it seems to me that the serious business will begin after the Games, when a new government will really be in place, as well as the National Assembly.”
Said Roizen, “Now that the threat has disappeared and the event is approaching, Paris 2024 is once again the main topic, between the anticipation of the competition and the inconvenience of everyday life.”
Not that there aren’t other concerns.
“The first thing is safety. In this period of global unrest, safety is the first condition for the athletes to succeed in their performances,” Roizen said. “Everything has been done, and the State is mobilized as never before, but zero risk is not possible.”
France has been the target of a series of terrorist attacks over the past decade including the November 2015 coordinated Islamic terrorist attacks that killed 130 in Paris and Saint-Denis, a northern suburb and the site of the Stade de France and other Olympic venues.
Paris has enlisted 22,000 private security officers and 45,000 soldiers and police officers to protect the 11,215 athletes and 15 million visitors. Officials have reduced the number of spectators for the opening ceremony from 600,000 to 320,000 and restricted access to the river and streets leading to other Olympic venues. French sports minister Amelie Oudea-Castera said the final cost of Olympic security has not yet been determined.
Hidalgo had hoped to demonstrate the cleanliness of the Seine after a nine-year clean-up plan by swimming in it on June 23 only the have the event postponed when rains raised both the river’s water and bacteria levels. The mayor’s swim was rescheduled for June 30 but was then pushed back because of the first round of the snap election.
Hidalgo finally got to take the plunge on Wednesday, pronouncing the Seine “exquisite.”
“The water is very, very good,” the mayor said. “A little cool, but not so bad.’’
Still local, IOC and international sports officials remain concerned that heavy rains could once again raise bacteria in the river to unsafe levels jeopardizing the marathon swimming and triathlon competitions scheduled to take place in the Seine.
The swimming competition at the first Paris Olympics in 1900 was held in the Seine, with athletes producing a series of record-shattering times, aided by swimming with the current. Concerns over performance enhancement cast a shadow over the swimming competition at these Games as well.
Eleven out of the 31 swimmers on China’s Olympic team tested positive for a banned heart drug in 2021. The 11 were among 23 swimmers who tested positive for the drug trimetazidine, known as TMZ, only to be privately cleared by World Anti-Doping Agency, a decision that allowed Chinese swimmers to compete at the Tokyo Olympic Games. Among those cleared were Zhang Yufei, who won gold medals in the women’s 200-meter butterfly and 200-meter freestyle relay in Tokyo, and Wang Shun, gold medalist in the men’s 200-meter individual medley. Both will compete in Paris.
Chinese officials said that the positive drug test was caused by the 23 athletes accidentally eating food contaminated with “very low levels” of TMZ. WADA accepted China’s explanation.But both Chinese swimming and Olympic officials and WADA have come under widespread international criticism after the positive tests and WADA’s decision were made public earlier this year.
Michael Phelps, the most decorated athlete in Olympic history, questioned the credibility of WADA during Congressional hearings last month and said the Chinese doping scandal posed a threat to the Games themselves.
“If we continue to let this slide any farther, the Olympic games might not even be there,” Phelps said.
“Right now people are just getting away with everything. How is that possible? It makes no sense. I’m one [who believes] if someone does test positive, I’d like to see a lifetime ban.”
Russia was banned from the 2021 Games after the country’s state sponsored doping program was exposed. More than 300 Russian athletes still competed in Tokyo under the flag of the Russian Olympic Committee, winning 71 medals.
Russia and Belarus are banned from Paris as the result of the Putin regime’s invasion of Ukraine. “No flag, anthem, colors or any other identifications whatsoever of Russia or Belarus will be displayed at the Olympic Games Paris 2024 in any official venue or any official function,” according to the IOC, but at least 36 Russian and Belarussian athletes have accepted invitations to compete as individual neutral athletes in Paris.
Heat will also be a major concern in Paris. In 2022, during a time period similar to this year’s Olympic window, temperatures hit 96 degrees.
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“For athletes, smaller performance-impacting issues like sleep disruption and last minute changes to event timings, to exacerbated health impacts and heat related stress and injury, the consequences can be varied and wide-ranging. Whilst global temperatures are continuing to rise, climate change should increasingly be viewed as an existential threat to sport,” Sebastian Coe, president of World Athletics, track and field’s global governing body, wrote in the forward of “Rings of Fire: Heat Risks At The 2024 Paris Olympics,” a University of Portsmouth climate report released last month.
Coe, a two-time Olympic 1,500 meter champion for Great Britain, was chairman of the local organizing committee for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, viewed by many as the last great Games.
The question, Matheson said, is “whether the luster is off the games with the citizenry. What we’ve seen for most of the 20th and 21st century is people have griped here and there about the costs for good reason. The London Games ended up costing three or four times what they were budgeted as, but people had a good time. So even say look these things are not making us rich, as a matter of fact, it’s the opposite, but they are making us happy. London had very fun events. That probably was the case in either Tokyo or Brazil that we had any feel-good effect at all. And you wonder whether these events, it’s not going to make you rich, but it might make you happy. That wasn’t happening the last couple of events.
“I’m interested to see how the event is embraced by Parisians. It is a fun event, but it’s an expensive event and it’s a hassle.
“And the question is have the Olympics gotten to a point where it’s more of a hassle than it is fun in which case these things make you poor and they make you unhappy which is the worst, the worst of all worlds and you wonder if the Olympics will ever grab back that joy that both they and the World Cup have had and generated.”