Olympia 2024: Paris wants to be more than just a backdrop for the third Olympics

The XXXIII starts next Friday. Modern Olympic Games in Paris, and no other city is so associated with the man who brought the games back from obscurity at the end of the 19th century: Baron Pierre de Coubertin. The aristocrat, born in 1864, emigrated to the USA to study law, where there was a lot of sport at the universities. For him, the sports of fencing, rowing, swimming, boxing and shooting became his passion. In addition to exercise, he soon became more deeply concerned with the role of sport in human health and psychology. In 1894, the young man convinced the 2,000 delegates at the World Congress for Athletic Renewal in Paris of his idea to revive the Olympic Games of ancient Greece in a contemporary form.

The first modern games were held in 1896, symbolically in Athens in an ancient stadium that had been restored for this purpose. The second one took place in Paris, as Coubertin had always planned. But this is hardly known in France’s capital. At best, we are talking about the Paris Games from 1924, exactly 100 years ago. “The Games of 1900 have been completely forgotten because the World Exhibition was taking place here at the time and the organizers had prevailed against the International Olympic Committee led by Coubertin,” explains sports historian Pascal Blanchard. »As a result of their pressure, these second games of the modern era were officially called only the International Competition for Physical Exercise and Sport. They were nothing more than an appendage of the World’s Fair and were only noticed by a few visitors.«

The games in 1924 were held again in Paris at Coubertin’s express request and were intended, not least, to make the “flop” of 1900 forgotten. “The event was initially not a good one,” says Blanchard. “When the award was made, the city had promised to build a modern and, at the time, huge stadium on the northern outskirts of the city with 100,000 spectator seats, but the financing failed due to the looming economic crisis.” So the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had to accept the proposal of the private sector Racing Club de France. He offered to build a much more modest stadium with 45,000 seats on a site that the club owned in the northwestern suburb of Colombes and for which he demanded half of the income from ticket sales.

Debates from 1924 and 2024 are similar

Many elite members of the IOC turned up their noses at the working-class suburb of Colombe with its numerous foreign families, but it was the only way to ensure that the Games did not fail. The opening and closing ceremonies as well as most of the competitions took place in this stadium. “For the first time, there was an athletes’ village nearby,” reports Blanchard. »But the twelve wooden barracks were extremely spartan, which many athletes complained about. The US delegation even rented an empty castle nearby and moved their team there.

The Colombes Olympic Stadium was 20 kilometers from Paris city center, which led to a dispute over poor transport connections. Extending a metro line was out of the question for cost reasons, so in the end only a suburban line was slightly rerouted and equipped with an additional station. “The debates of 1924 and 2024 are very similar,” says Pascal Blanchard. »In addition to the poor transport connections, there are complaints about the horribly expensive entry tickets and hotel accommodation, as well as concerns about the budget, which is threatening to get out of hand, and crime. Today, there is only the threat of terrorist attacks and hacker attacks, as well as concerns about environmental pollution. Despite the numerous problems, the 1924 Games were ultimately a huge popular success, so much so that Pierre de Coubertin happily retired from his post as IOC President could.

Otherwise, the motto “Faster, higher, further!”, used for the first time in Paris, remained. The five gold medals won by the Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi and the three victories by the American swimmer Johnny Weissmüller, who later became Tarzan, also went down in history embarked on a successful film career. A total of around 3,000 athletes from 44 countries took part, 135 of whom were women, because, starting with tennis, the first associations ignored Coubertin’s misogynistic attitude. When the 2024 Games open, men and women will be represented equally among the 10,500 participants for the first time.

The biggest special feature this time, however, will be that Paris will not only be the backdrop, but will also become the venue for the competitions with many historical locations. The opening ceremony is not planned in a stadium, but rather as a boat parade on the Seine. The country delegations are distributed across more than 100 ships, which are more or less large depending on the size of the team. They drive six kilometers through the city center, past more than 300,000 spectators, to the Trocadero Bridge at the Eiffel Tower, where the athletes disembark to attend the ceremonial opening. More than five billion people are expected to watch the games around the world in the two weeks afterwards.

Sitting sports in historical places

Paris 2024 should also set new standards for the cost-conscious organization of the Olympic Games with as little CO2 as possible₂-Put load. That’s why, with the new swimming center and the residential buildings in the Olympic Village, only extremely few new buildings were built whose future use is also guaranteed. Instead, many competitions take place in long-standing facilities such as the Stade de France, the Prinzenparkstadion or the Stade Roland Garros, famous for the French Open of tennis stars. Even a sports facility built for the 1924 Games, a recently renovated swimming pool on the northeastern edge of the city, is included, but only for training purposes.

For many indoor competitions, slightly modified or expanded event halls, multi-purpose halls and trade fair pavilions are used. Even the Grand Palais on the Champs-Élysées, built and recently renovated for the 1900 World Exhibition, now serves as a home for fencers and taekwondo fighters. The most spectacular venues will certainly be the historic squares and parks around which mobile spectator stands have been built. Sports fans will cheer on skateboarders, 3×3 basketball players and breaking dancers on Concorde Square, which is closed to traffic. People shoot with bows and arrows on the Esplanade des Invalides and play volleyball below the Eiffel Tower. And in the park of the Palace of Versailles you can watch dressage and show jumping as well as the modern pentathlon.

“By only building a few new buildings and largely using existing facilities and buildings, we want to keep expenses within limits and get by with the estimated 8.8 billion euros,” emphasizes organization boss Tony Estanguet. »This is the lowest budget for the Olympic Games in decades. At the same time, Paris sees itself as a laboratory for new environmental protection measures in the spirit of the Paris climate summit in 2015. The goal is to reduce CO₂-To keep emissions below 1.5 million tons, compared to 3.4 million tons at the 2012 Games in London.

So that the triathlon and open water swimming competitions can take place in the Seine as planned, more than one billion euros were invested in the metropolitan region to connect entire suburban districts to the public sewage network. A huge collecting basin has been built under the center itself to prevent rainwater contaminated by street dirt from entering the Seine unfiltered during heavy rainfall if the pipe network leading to the sewage treatment plants is overwhelmed. Such plans and announcements had been made on and off since 1977, but they were only now implemented with a view to the Olympic Games. To demonstrate the success of the measures, Sports Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra and Mayor Anne Hidalgo, accompanied by television cameras, climbed into the Seine and swam a few laps.