Dr. Jan Andre Lee Ludvigsen
Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Politics with Sociology at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. He has published widely on the politics of sport mega-events, including Sport Mega-Events, Security and Covid-19 (2022, Routledge).
Email: J.A.Ludvigsen@ljmu.ac.uk
Dr. Adam Talbot
Lecturer in Event Management at the University of the West of Scotland. His research focuses on protest, housing and human rights at sport mega-events.
Email: adam.talbot@uws.ac.uk
It has become an almost standardized, quadrennial pre-Olympic ritual to describe mega-event security as resembling of contemporary warfare. The Paris 2024 Summer Olympics and Paralympics reinforced this, but concurrently represented another reference point in the Olympics’ political history with the French authorities’ temporary approval of – for the first time in the EU’s history – the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) surveillance technology to assist crowd management, reports of a $348 million security budget, and as many as 45,000 security staff being deployed for the opening ceremony on the River Seine. What is more, the Olympics have, for long, constituted a “testing ground” not merely for new technologies, but as Clavel writes, for international cooperation – exemplified recently by The Guardian’s article reporting that British police officers would share their experiences from London’s 2012 Games with the French organizers in the efforts to secure Paris.
What we see, therefore, is a quintessential, international political effort in the creation and maintenance of Paris 2024 as a secure, global spectacle. This is not surprising but – as this commentary argues – paradoxically all this occurs in spaces where politics are designed out, aided by “Rule 50” of the IOC’s Olympic Charter holding that: “No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas”. Rule 50 represents a framework protecting the “neutrality of sport and the Olympic Games”. It means that Olympic spaces must be so-called “clean venues” – free from political messages or non-official advertising which may not only compromise the IOC’s relationships with their partners but, as Klauserputs it so eloquently, it may put a damper on the organizers’ much-desired “climate of joy” if the Olympics become a site for political expression or protest. The contradictions are multiple. Academics show that the imposition of political neutrality has impacted spectators and athletes’ right to freedom of speech and expression at previous events and how a contradiction exist when demanding politically neutral spaces while also embracing human rights discourses in other domains. Of course, similar policies are not uncommon at other sporting events: Paris 2024 and Euro 2024 represented the summer of politicized mega-events with “no politics” rules.
Returning to the matter of security, this remains highly contested in Olympic cities. For Giulianotti and Brownell, “[i]ntensified securitization has been resisted by some institutions and movements that are associated with global civil society, for example through organized protests in and around sport mega-events”. Privacy campaign group La Quadrature du Net teamed up with local anti-Olympic groups including Saccage 2024 to campaign against the experiment with algorithmic video surveillance, where CCTV images are monitored by AI. Activists from Saccage 2024 have been visited by activists from previous host cities, including Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro, and heard numerous examples of how temporary Olympic security infrastructure became permanent post-Games. While the legislation enabling the use of these technologies is temporary, La Quadrature du Net note that there have already been moves in the National Assembly to legalise it permanently in specific contexts, such as public transit. Indeed, the announcement on the eve of Paris 2024 that the 2030 Winter Games will be hosted in the French Alps practically guarantees that this “experiment” will continue.
Criticism has not just emerged domestically. In the Games’ build-up, Amnesty International were vocal in their opposition to the mentioned AI surveillance following its parliamentary approval and have claimed that it impedes the right to peaceful protest and comes with enormous privacy and discriminatory implications. In May 2024 – two months before the opening ceremony – the organization staged a symbolic “funeral protest” where, Picazo writes, “outside Père Lachaise cemetery, men solemnly carried a coffin marked ‘privacy’ from a hearse to an impromptu roadside funeral parlour filled with mourners dressed in black”.
Considering the Olympics’ “political neutral” spaces, such political contestations could not reach the Olympic spaces during the event given that the host city is obliged to design out some political acts (e.g., protests) while being completely dependent on otherpolitical acts (e.g., parliamentary approval of surveillance, a decision to bid for/fund the Olympics, or the displays of national anthems or spectators wrapped in flags or jerseys that are broadcast globally). A counter-Olympic opening ceremony organised by a coalition of social movements under the banner “le revers de la medaille” (the other side of the medal) was organised the day before the opening ceremony – but far from any Olympic venues. The ceremony highlighted a diverse array of social issues and how they have been negative impacted by plans for the Games, from the aforementioned privacy concerns to 12,500 unhoused people, many of them migrants, being bussed out of the city in preparation from the Games.
Hence, while extraordinary or exceptional legal and regulative frameworks commonly accompany the Olympics, it remains the case that these frameworks’ meanings and implications cannot be contested in the same primary spaces where they are enacted, when they are enacted. Yet while the IOC are adamant that politics and the Olympics do not mix; it instead appears that contestations over the mentioned “climate of joy” is what is rendered incompatible with the Games; not “top-down” political decisions to employ the Games as a “testing ground” for new laws and rules. This perpetuates the situation where, in this case, “security”, and the means to ensure it, are solely defined through the eyes of the “powerful”.
