Dr. Peter English
Senior Lecturer in Journalism, University of the Sunshine Coast. His research focuses on journalists, content and social media, as well as media representations of sporting issues. He is the author of Australian Sports Journalism: Power, Control and Threats. Peter has worked as a sports journalist for more than two decades.
Email: penglish@usc.edu.au
Paris 2024’s visual legacy shines brightly in the afterglow of the Games. For two weeks, the City of Light showed off, with postcards at every corner. At times it felt like the athletes were the tourists, instead of being the main event.
“Nothing will ever compare to this,” the Irish taekwondo athlete Jack Wooley said in The Guardian. “You’ve got eyes. You can see for yourself. You look at it, it’s absolutely beautiful.” He was talking about the magical, shimmering Grand Palais, which also hosted the fencing, but he could have been praising many venues.
The road race winner Remco Evenepoel stopped for a memory at the finish line in front of the Eiffel Tower backdrop, just across from the stunning setting for the beach volleyball, where Brazil and Sweden won gold. The BMX freestylers and skateboarders flipped under the watch of the Luxor Obelisk of La Concorde, while the equestrians jumped in the back garden of the Versailles. The triathletes and open water swimmers eventually splashed in the Seine, where Pont Alexandre III was as much a star as the competitors.
“These were not just the Paris Games but the Games in Paris,” The Age’s chief sports columnist Greg Baum wrote. “These were by far the most visually spectacular Games of all. The biggest star of these Games, if not swimmer extraordinaire Leon Marchand, was the Eiffel Tower.”
But Olympic legacy is more complicated than optics. In the eyes of the IOC it “encompasses all the tangible and intangible long-term benefits initiated or accelerated by the hosting of the Olympic Games”.
Paris was the first to fall under the IOC’s Olympic Agenda 2020 for host cities, which called for a greater focus on the environment. Sustainability is difficult to define neatly, involving economic and environmental elements and often-meaningless buzzwords, but Paris wanted to be “the greenest ever Games”, with less waste – actual and financial.
The headline problem was the city’s drains rushing E. coli and other pollution into the Seine, a result of unseasonable summer rain linked with global warming. After a day’s delay, the triathletes continued undeterred – although there were reports later of stomach problems.
That the swimming happened at all was a massive relief for the city of Paris, which had spent €1.4 billionattempting to clean up the river that has been banned for swimming since 1923. Despite the noble intentions, the results of this legacy vision were as mixed as the water quality readings over the two weeks.
Other sustainability-related issues included claims of greenwashing through Coke-bottle wastage, athletes complaining there wasn’t enough meat in the food halls, poor air-conditioning in the village, and single beds made of cardboard. A photo went viral of the Italian swimming gold medalist Thomas Ceccon sleeping in a park instead of his room. “The IOC can sugar-coat it all it wants,” The Sydney Morning Herald’s chief sports writer Andrew Webster said, “but the preference for a sustainable Olympics ahead of athlete comfort and performance was a mistake.”
The temporary venues and grandstands at seven venues within Paris were viewed much more positively, and avoided some of the wastage of previous Olympics when stadiums were left to decompose. It is one of the reasons why organizers’ predictions of no debt from the Games were realized.
Not since Atlanta 1996 has a Games finished with a budget surplus – a result which is definitely worth a medal. As The Guardian’s chief sports writer Barney Ronay said, Paris was “a Games that covered its costs, [and] doesn’t reek of overspend and pointless legacy projects”.
Sports-wise, there was a lack of sustainability in the introduction of breakdancing. It will go the same way as the one-off obstacle swimming from Paris 1900, no matter how much huffing and puffing comes from Snoop Dogg. The rapper was the Games’ off-field MVP, producing a social media collage of clips and memes.
Paris delivered many other lessons for future hosts, but some key ones are impossible to match due to the city’s beauty and architecture. This is especially difficult when thinking ahead to Brisbane 2032, which will stage a more modest and regional Olympics and Paralympics. But, as Thomas Bach has said, all Games are different and are encouraged to reflect “the cultural, social, environmental, sports background of the host”.
The City of the Light’s role was in re-illuminating the Olympics. After the sickness and soullessness of Tokyo 2021, Paris reclaimed the love for the Games and the stunning 16-day show will be remembered like the glittering of the Eiffel Tower at sunset. It is a spectacular legacy.
