Prof. David Rowe
Emeritus Professor of Cultural Research, Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, with honorary positions at Bath, Beijing Foreign Studies and London Universities. A publicly engaged sociologist of media and popular culture, David’s books include Sport, Culture and the Media: The Unruly Trinity (2004, second edition, McGraw Hill) and Global Media Sport: Flows, Forms and Futures (2011, Bloomsbury).
Email: d.rowe@westernsydney.edu.au
Twitter: @rowe_david
When reflecting on the preceding Summer Olympics and Paralympics, I wrote of a spectral, pandemic-plagued event that “happened in a Tokyo that was largely unseen”. Three years later, with the virus omnipresent but tamed by vaccination, the host city of Paris was impossible not to see. This is a salutary reminder of the deep dependence of mega media sport events on projecting a sense of place even when, with conspicuous exceptions, most contests occur in enclosed, standardized sport infrastructure.
There are compelling political economic reasons why this is the case. In previous Olympic bidding cycles – increasingly rare, at least in prominent zones of the liberal-democratic West – the International Olympic Committee (IOC) could effortlessly exploit the seductive illusion of a mutually beneficial relationship between Olympism and host city/country finances. Although few reputable economists entertain the fantasy that investment by hosts results in a budgetary bonanza, the fiction has been maintained and disbelief suspended for contrasting reasons.
For the IOC, with its XL Bully dog-grip on Olympic intellectual property and hosting contracts, persuading a host to bear the risk, wear the cost, and forego global media and sponsorship rights revenue is all upside in terms of profile, influence, and balance sheet. For hosts, the main advantages are accelerated, publicly subsidized infrastructural development and a mostly intangible (and short-lived) boost to civic and national morale and to global image-based positioning. As Atlanta 1996, Athens 2004 and Tokyo 2020/1 painfully discovered, poor planning, execution and/or bad luck expose the vulnerability of the baby-holding Olympic host.
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo cited prior misfortune as compelling motivation for bidding in June 2015. She referred to Parisian and French creativity, resilience, freedom and democracy following the deadly political violence in the city in January and November of that year, the latter involving major sporting and musical venues. Paris had already mounted failed bids for the 1988, 2008, and 2012 Games.
If hosting the Games was intended to stimulate the tourist trade, this ambition was at odds with plans by Tourism Minister Olivia Gregoire to counter ‘overtourism’ in Paris and other parts of France, including Normandy and Brittany in the north and Bouches-du-Rhône and Pyrénées-Atlantiques in the south.
Staging the Greatest Show on Earth exposed continuing tensions between Paris, which for many observers embodies La France, and the rest of the nation seemingly positioned as its hinterland. It was insisted that this was a Games for the whole country and its dispersed territories. Yet, the majority of events took place in inner Paris and the surrounding Île-de-France area. Most other cities with an Olympic role, like Bordeaux, Lyon, Nantes, and Saint-Etienne (football) and Villeneuve-d’Ascq (basketball and handball), hosted stadium-based pursuits, severely limiting their opportunities for place brand exposure.
Paris staged not only the Seine and city-focused Opening Ceremony, but freewheeling en plein air sports like marathon swimming and running, road cycling, and triathlon. Even relatively static events could take place in globally familiar sites, such as beach volleyball beneath the Eiffel Tower and 3×3 basketball, BMX freestyle, breaking, skateboarding at Place de la Concorde. Revealingly, of “the 11 iconic venues of the Paris 2024” celebrated on its official website, six were in inner Paris, three in its environs (Colombes, Saint Denis and Versailles), one in the Pacific (Teahupo’o) and the other in Mediterranean France (Marseilles).
Marseilles, which also hosted football, did get some opportunity to display itself a little more expansively through the sailing competition, but after Paris the strongest sense of place came from another hemisphere altogether via surfing in Tahiti. This visual reminder of the global power and reach of the French Republic would have been routinely labelled ‘sportswashing’ if exercised by an illiberal state beyond the orbit of the West.
This Olympic activity in the Pacific took place in the aftermath of unrest in May and June in the French overseas territory of New Caledonia. The violence stemmed from unhappiness among members of the Indigenous Kanak community over proposed electoral changes seen as reducing their prospect of independence. Then the bitter snap French national elections concluded just 19 days before the Olympic Opening Ceremony, highlighting the country’s persistent difficulty in coming to terms with its imperialist and colonial history. Both internal and external problems will continue to beset the country long after the Paris Olympic flame has been extinguished.
Final confirmation that the city that controls and signifies the country dominated these Games is indicated by the event locations of the Paralympics. Only shooting in Chateauroux, central France occurred outside the Paris conurbation.
The Five Ring Circus summer caravan now moves on from the City of Love, Light and Shadow to the City of Angels, Dreams and Quartz in 2028. The Handover Ceremony in the Stade de France ended with a Mission Impossible flourish as famed screen actor Tom Cruise transported the Olympic flag to the Hollywood sign.
Visual memories of Paris 24, beyond the strictly sporting, are likely to be infused with its much-mythologized, monumental built environment and the romantic river flowing through it. Now Los Angeles’ venues, freeways, canyons, and beaches must compete with homegrown cinematic artifice, an Olympics of the imagination emerging from the dream factories of its dusty film lots.
