[Olympic Games 2024] Feel the Olympic spirit! Go in debt, hide your poor, clean a river, miss your only chance at a gymnastic medal, and other good fun.
Do you feel the heat? I know, it’s the middle of winter, but I’m asking you to use your imagination. We won’t go much further if you already start arguing about everything I say, and there will be plenty to argue about. The voices in my head assure me as much.
So, again. Do you feel the heat? The muscles underneath your skin, steely and wired for movement, aching to contract and move the glorious machinery of your body to new heights? The will to sing with a chorus of a thousand fanatics, lost in adoration as a lone athlete beats insurmountable odds?
Then your imagination has taken you back to the summer of 2024 in Paris, city of love, misguided tourists and pollution, not necessarily in that order.
I am your guide, some would say your cursed henchman.
If the sight of popular sports elicit only a sigh of disgust, you may be a creature of the higher arts and spirits, or a meany. Your pick.
There, now that these people are gone, we are among us simple beings. Simple beings who like to see people struggle, complain, and most of all, we like drama.
You know the Olympic Games. In all likelihood, you watched them, enjoyed them, followed them and caught more drama than I did. As such, this won't be an exhaustive tour, as there's too much of it and many small things you already know about. I've chosen the few tidbits I had a front row seat for, as I was living in Paris at the time.
It’s like looking at a living pig while you wet your knife and ponder about which part you will keep to yourself. The rind? The tenderloin? Decisions, decisions. And frankly, I just like to reminisce about a period that was pretty fun all in all. For me, less so for others.
Another reason to limit the discourse is that a lot of the drama is simply too divisive in nature, and as much as I like to complain about the rules keeping us human beings down and stifling our creativity, I agree with this subreddit’s tacit rule of avoiding that can of worms. Fear not, there’s still plenty to talk about.
Now follow me will you, and let’s start from the beginning.
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Let's get the party started
(How did these guys ever get a featuring with Big Ali? Some mysteries will forever remain unsolved. But we got Big Ali saying "Pain au chocolat", and that's priceless.)
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Paris started bidding for the Olympics in – checks notes – 2005, when they lost to the cursed Albion and that black cherry on top of it: London. Paris would finally win a nomination as host-city in 2017. That’s twelve full years of failed attempts, losing to London, Rio and Japan.
Do you know how Paris won? By being the last ones standing. Paris got 2024, Lost Angeles got 2028, there were no other contestants because the costs of hosting Olympics were getting prohibitive.
The French weren’t exactly motivated either. Well, some were, but you know the French. As long as there are two French people alive, someone will disagree with the other out of principle.
But this wasn’t just for the sake of arguing.
Since 2005, we went through an economy crash, Covid, and a few other events. The French debt has gone up by quite a bit.
Talking about Paris, Victor Matheson, a College of the Holy Cross professor of economics who has researched the financial costs of the Olympics said :
Under 10 billion is still a number of billion France didn't have.
This wasn’t the only point of contention.
Transport is complicated at the best of time.
Olympic Games would require :
- Closing roads for the bike races and marathons.
- Roads reserved for Olympic transports and emergencies.
- Handling an influx of tourists like never before.
In 2022, the expected number of people to be transported per day during the Olympics was about 7 millions, and 3 million during the Paralympics. That's twice the usual number, and you've seen on the picture how the normal situation can be hard to handle.
New metro lines are to be build, three are already so late they will be finished in 2026. Bus lines will be made longer, more trains are planned. The good part is that all sports venues are on the usual transport lines. The bad part is that it’s unclear if there will be enough personnel to transport all the beer-drinking screamers. Ile-de-France Mobilité, the ones in charge, made a request for new drivers. And nobody answered.
To give you an idea how dire things are, webpages started cropping up to know which bus and metro lines to avoid.
And that's not counting cases of sabotage, a coordinated attack on several train tracks shortly before the event.
Needless to say, the closer we got to the Olympics, the more you heard voices pointing out how we weren’t ready at all. All the skeptics - the only resource France has to spare - were in an even worse (or better depending on point of view) mood. Some Schadenfreude in there too, like sitting at a well-traveled road known for accidents and ready to snap photos.
But let us remain positive, roll up our sleeves (I'm told this is sexy), start the big works, and hire undocumented immigrants (I'm told this is less sexy).
It's the worldwide problem of construction industry employers smelling an opportunity and hiring cheap people they can throw under the bus (which lacks a driver) whenever work inspection comes by. But, how to put it, it doesn't give your country the best image when the Olympic village is built in ways that could at best be described as "morally dubious" while politicians praise the coming event as exemplary.
A special unit was created when the case was blown open, but luckily, there were only seven work inspectors in this unit for the entire Olympic mess, dozens of construction sites and thousands of workers. Most illegal practices will never be spotted, accidents won't be a biggy because hey, they never were here officially. Phew, that was close.
Let's make a pause and play pairs.
I say Laurel, you say... Hardy!
I say apples, you say... Oranges!
I say hiring undocumented immigrants, you say... Corruption!
Mate, you're good at this.
We won the nomination because there were no other contestants left.
Somehow, we still needed corruption just to be sure to win. This wasn't the only problem, further contracts were awarded in shady ways. But let it not be said that I'm a dishonest donkey (I am, but that's besides the point), it was later said no serious corruption was found. Investigation still goes on, but the worst case scenario should be out the window. And then they started police raids again due to suspicion of serious corruption. Go figure.
Illegals, corruption, what else is there... Oh yes! the homeless!
That doesn't look pretty in the city of love, now does it? Sure, France was nice during the pandemic, when hotels signed deals with the state to give temporary lodgings to those without a roof, but now tourists are coming back in full and there's only so much negative net-worth we can accommodate before getting sad. The solution is simple and practical, like every solution should be. Put the homeless on a bus and get them into newly built shelters across the city. Shelters with shitty conditions, that were less chosen by the local mayors and more like imposed. Official discourse was "give the homeless proper conditions." Officious perception of the official discourse was "let's get rid of the homeless in the capital however we can, peripheral cities are irrelevant during the Olympic games and we don't care what comes after". This however, isn't unique to Paris, and seems to happen often during big sports events. The articles I found describing this were pay-walled though.
Speaking about money, breaking even with costly Olympics requires grossing in some more income. We spoke of transports. Here's the transport price. During the Olympics, the price of metro tickets doubled, bus tickets became one third more expensive.
I assume that tourists traveling to Paris do have some means if they can afford to come here. Thing is, we still got a truckload of students, poor workers and whatnot who won't see a thing of the Olympic Games but will have to pay double transport fare to get to work. Folks didn't like that.
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Almost there
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Controversies come and go, but the games are about to be kicked off. Colored scarfs are around the necks, flags are in hand, the stadium is there, so is the Seine.
Ah, the Seine.
Old river with old city, the result is that the sewage system empties directly into the water. And you wouldn't want to swim in the water where poor people urinate, do you? Thought so, you hate the poor.
1.6 billion were spent to clean a river full of dejection. And old bikes, radiators, and unexpected if worthless treasures. The water was tested daily in different spots to ensure it got better each day, and it did.
Still, doubts were high, and trainings for triathletes were postponed during the games due to rain, which got many of them angry. Ultimately, they swam.
And someone puked. But Props to this article for pointing out that triathletes do get to swim in dirty water quite often though.
And from having seen more than one triathlon, athletes do happen to vomit. Sometimes, it's just the effort.
Another point of contention was the growing police force coming in.
40.000 barriers, tens of thousands of policemen, of military folks, drones, everything.
It was hotly debated. Too much? Is it really necessary? This is a country shaken by a series of coordinated attacks in 2015.
Interestingly, the police was pissed too. Here's a video from a policeman complaining about handling traffic. It might seem like nothing, but it turns out this is an investigator who normally works on important cases in another city, but was forced to come to Paris handle traffic. It was a bad time to get murdered in the province. While Paris was turned into a fortress, the other regions were skinned and crime there was deemed less important than security in the capital.
Other works are finishing left and right. In Aubervilliers, there's something called "Jardin ouvriers", parcels for people to grow vegetables. Originally meant to better the condition of the working class, it's now mostly a nice thing that exists in some cities and that people cling to as a rare place to grow stuff.
The Olympic pool is planned on a parking adjacent to the gardens. But adding a solarium would tie it all together, and the planetarium is planned right over 4000 square meters of garden.
The gardens didn't like it, and decided to grow people and tents to protest. These are notoriously harder to cut down, something about ethics and morals.
Alas, capitalism won, and 4000 square meters of gardens are made into flatland. No more veggies for you.
And then, a sudden development. Judges judged (they do that often) that the solarium was illegal, and the project was abandoned, but not before uprooting the gardens. A half-victory for defenders of vegetables grown with car exhausts.
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Let the games begin!
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26 July 2024.
The opening ceremony. It's wild, it's all over the place, and you can't beat the french for originality. Talking with Frenchmen, some really disliked how the ceremony "lacked respect" for our kings and queens. Somehow, the fact that their ancestors were a tad more extreme by virtue of decapitating the nobility didn't seem to bother them. And HEAVY METAL! Mixed with Opera! If you think I liked it, let me plead guilty. I did, some parts were a bit boring but all-around, I expected a thousand times worse and was very happily surprised. And Celine Dion finishing the ceremony by singing Edith Piaf's "hymne à l'amour" despite suffering from a stiff-man syndrome which ended her carrier was phenomenal and got me emotional, and I never listened to her music before.
A good start.
It's like movies that get panned by the critics because they are too negative. Few works can allow themselves to be bleak all the time, it takes a genius writer like Cormac MacCarthy to pull it off. For the plebeians, the secret is to make it a roller-coaster, give a moment of levity, of beauty, before ripping it all away and laugh devilishly at the poor sod who thought things would get better.
Let's start with food. I like food. Do you like food? Everyone likes food. If you don't, the door is over there. This is an exclusive club where people like eating, I've decreed that five seconds ago. Athletes like food too. HA! Maybe I'm an athlete!
I'm back from taking a look at the mirror, it appears I've been mistaken.
Athletes eat a lot more than you or I, but somehow look leaner than I do. Bloody genetics.
Evidently, the people who prepared the food weren't athletes themselves.
It got bad enough that team Great-Britain snubbed the Olympic village over complaints of not enough food on one hand, and under-cooked meat on the other. Critics believe the only thing they didn't digest is Napoleon showing them a huge middle-finger by marching all across Europe while throwing a tantrum. The history between France and England is weird.
The idea was to provide stuff made in France and more or less respectful of the season and climate, it took some days to get it right. Adjustments were made.
It's also noted that this is a recurring game of give and take happening during most Olympics.
At the beginning of every Games there’s usually two or three issues—the big one this time is the food in the village, which is not adequate said Anson [Andy Anson, chief executive of Team Great Britain] told The Telegraph.
Meanwhile, in a little village not yet overtaken by the Romans, trouble is brewing.
Six South Korean swimmers moved out of the athletes' village. American athletes did the same pretty fast, and unlike the English, I have no easy excuse to explain why they left except there were problems with the village. For the Koreans, the transport problematic came to a head and they moved to a hotel closer to their competition venue. Otherwise, they had a long bus ride on a hot day in an even hotter bus, which is as much time lost training.
Emily Kaplan puts it best:
It's a classic conundrum for Olympic athletes. The village, a cluster of dorms for thousands of athletes from across the world, is an unparalleled opportunity for camaraderie and community building. But it's not necessarily conducive for competitors who rely on routine and have one opportunity to perform at their best.
That's especially true for those who play professionally. The U.S. men's basketball team has been staying at hotels since 1992.
It's not just the highest-profile (or highest-paid) athletes who are lodging complaints.
Over the first weekend, Australian water polo player Matilda Kearns posted to social media that she "already had a massage to undo the damage" from sleeping on the mattress -- which is billed as having varying levels of firmness. U.S. men's gymnast Fred Richard is proud to talk about the mattress he prearranged to have delivered ahead of the Games. Richard explained that at the Olympics his mindset is "to live like a king" -- which is hardly guaranteed in communal accommodations. USA Gymnastics quickly executed a partnership with BedJet, to provide its athletes a cooling, warming and sweat-drying system for beds to help them stay cool at night.
One issue the Americans flagged early was the lack of air conditioning. Experts had warned that 2024 could be the hottest Games in history. To be environmentally conscious, organizers installed geothermal cooling systems that maintain rooms at least 10 degrees cooler than outside temperatures, and no warmer than high 70s at night. But several federations, including the U.S., took matters into their own hands and provided portable AC units.
Speaking of heat, Italian swimmer Thomas Ceccon would make the news by sleeping outside. Parisians collectively let out a sigh of relief as the city without the homeless sleeping in parks felt wrong.
In terms of sourcing your stuff locally, there were the Phriges, the nice mascot based on the "bonnet phrygien", symbol of freedom in France and the US too I believe. They were derided for looking like a body-part with many nervous connections responsible for pleasure in the female anatomy, but ended up being well-liked. Oh, and the toys were fabricated in China. This is a more complex matter than it appears, the firm making them is technically french, but delocalised in China. And China doesn't have the best reputation for respecting worker's right, a big subject in France.
It did made some noise, but it was drowned by the cheers.
Where were we? We booted out the homeless, the poor are put aside by being unable to afford transport, and abroad, workers are fabricating toys in questionable conditions. I feel right. I feel Ethical.
Drama, drama, but the game is in full swing and brings us great moments, there were so many, just from the top of my head:
Leon Marchand under suspicion of being a dolphin.
Simone Biles who's got a smile brighter than the 956 gold medals she got. (Still can't wrap my head around how you can humanly move with such power and precision)
Paris flaunting it's venues, they got quite a few.
"Imagine" from John Lennon breaking a dispute during the Brazil / Canada beach volley women's final.
Greco-Roman wrestling legend from Cuba Mijain Lopez retires after dominating the sport for his entire career.
Netherland's Femke Bol breaks every law of physics and morphology to go from 4th to first place in the mixed relay 4x400 final.
Ahmed El Gendy wins Egypt's one and only gold medal, and it is a beauty.
France wins it's first medal in women gymnastics since 2004 with Kaylia Nemour, the entire country erupts in... What do you mean, it's Algeria who's cheering? Not France? What happened?
Let me have a quick look.
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What in the burning hell?
Alrighty. I didn't keep tabs on the Olympics as they happened all the time, drama is something I enjoy on this sub but rarely outside of it. Strange, isn’t it? I spend time writing like I was an evil Leprechaun of the internet, a barely sapient being with crooked fingers giving the evil laugh as my legs dangle from the chair, while in truth I am a silver fox with a ravaging smile, a deep intellect full of philosophical groundbreaking theories, and a muscular body I do not dare showing off for fear of making people jealous.
This situation and the flaming pie of manure that is the state of professional gymnastics in France is worth an entire post of its own, but I don't know enough about gymnastics to do that one. But as a French highlight of this wreck-fest of an Olympic? Now that’s something I can definitely do.
It starts before the Olympics.
The video is now unavailable, but in 2023, a month-long investigation became a television reportage about the the french gymnastics federation (Fédération Française de Gymnastique, FFG). It uncovered physical and psychological violence. A lot of it. Mainly from a trainer who had already been denounced for his methods as far back as 2007, and from a top manager. Six athletes gave testimony, and they were all under the age of 18 when it happened. Example range from: being forced to perform while suffering from an ankle fracture, being repeatedly insulted and slapped. In this same federation, the technical director got a suspended sentence of 6 months for similar behavior towards another athlete.
All this to say, it doesn't start all too well. There's the FFG on one side, and there are individual clubs on the other. Enter Kaylia Nemour, she trains in an such a club in Avoine since she was a kid and it's discovered early that she's got potential.
But to heighten their chances at medals, the FFG lands a new edict in 2021: all Olympic hopefuls would be required to train full-time under the umbrella of the National Institute of Sport, Expertise and Performance either in Vincennes, a suburb of Paris, or in St.-Étienne, in southeastern France.
Kaylia likes her club and it's right next from where she lives, so why the hell would she operate the switch?
The FFG does not like that.
Kaylia also suffers from osteochondritis, a conditon which often afflicts professionals in gymnastics, and it requires an operation. Things get heated when Kaylia's personal doctors give her the green to train, while the FFG doctors refuse.
Meanwhile, her gym is under fire and is stripped of its status as a state training center. The FFG goes as far as asking the regional authorities to investigate the Chirilcencos (the gym's head honchos) about "emprise sur mineurs", which is like too much influence on minors or something like that. Many interviews later and the Chirilcencos are cleared.
A commission presiding over the mess would later qualify the federation's actions as harassment.
And here is Kaylia, not allowed to compete because the federation doctors don't want her to, the gym of her hometown under fire and her trainers and coaches under investigations.
Her workaround is to leave for Algeria. Kaylia is entitled to an Algerian passport as her father was born there, but it requires a letter of release from the original federation to compete under a new flag or have a one-year delay. You can bet that the FFG refused.
It took the french sports minister intervening in 2022 to force the federation to write that letter and let her qualify for the 2023 world championships.
The rest, as they say, is history. After the championships she qualifies for the Olympics and rocks it on the bars.
Instead of winning the first Olympic title for France since 2004, she became the first ever Algerian and African woman to get Olympic gold in gymnastics. After the Olympics, she chose to stay in Algeria for further training and medals. Naturally, the french gymnastics federation immediately criticized this decision, saying she and her entourage chose to leave for Algeria without any attempts at dialogues. This did nothing to better the FFG's reputation.
Thanks for the beautiful performance Naylia, and godspeed.
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Unsportsmanlike conduct
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Olympics are beautiful, people respecting athletes and the sports.
Someone tells me in my earpiece that I should stop with the low-key sarcasm, it's getting old. Fine, fine.
There's been plenty of drama, and there's no need to write a million words. It's a collection of little instants left and right, from busted drug-buyers to hormones overflowing to performance enhancing product scandals. There are many, many you do know better than me. So instead of a wall of text, I just put a few tidbits, random instants that peppered the games. See these as the dessert you get to nibble at while enjoying a delightful conversation with your host (me), or a horrible time with your step-family (your step-family).
And as you sample one, you may remember another instance you've witnessed.
Guram Tushishvili is a muscular, well-built man who competes in the heavyweight judo division. Sweat glistens down his stellar pectorals, a wink of his left butt-cheek can provoke a butterfly effect and is currently under investigation for unleashing the Fukushima tsunami.
He may also have troubles accepting the results of an Ippon in the quarterfinals against french giant Teddy Rinner. This also hampered the national Georgian judo team as the behavior disqualified him from competing in the team judo competition.
More high-tech, because we live in the era of AIs and drones, Canadian officials admitted to routine use of the them (drones, not AIs), to spy on the opposition for their football teams. As it goes with cheating, this may just bite them in their maple syrup-flavored ass and threaten their place during the 2026 World Cup.
Less high-tech, less muscular, but no less fit in the butt region (my, it's getting hot in here), a good old investigation for fixing matches overshadowed the US' first lost bouts in the fencing competition.
Whatever your taste, there was something for everyone.
There is more, but like any good dessert, you shouldn't offer too much lest the invitees start feeling sick.
That's because they aren't athletes and can't eat like they do. Genetics, I'm telling you.
If you've watched the games, there's surely that instant, a moment quickly forgotten because there's so much happening. But you caught it, and those are little memories just for you.
Cherish these.
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It's been a pleasure meeting you, but it's time to extinguish the Olympic flame
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11 August 2024.
We've seen Paris, Parisians, sports and highlights. But every good party must come to an end. The closing ceremony is starting, and if the opening ceremony is anything to go by, it's going to be just as weird. Shhh... it starts.
What is the aftermath of all this?
If my memory of Olympics is anything to go by, the exact same stuff will happen in four years. Doping cases, sore losers, weird drama, the usual.
But we had this nice discussion you and I. Yes, I know, it was one-sided on account of me writing and you reading, can you stop with the nitpicking? My word you're impolite, lucky for me it's soon over.
Apparently, the Olympic games made a benefit. 28 million, not much compared to the billion-wide project, but still an unexpected profit. However, I would urge you to take the number with a grain of salt.
Better to have the hindsight of a few years to ascertain if the event really made a benefit or a loss, I'm wary of such announcements on short notice. It's not just the expense to build stuff, but also wider interconnected works not always accounted for. Likewise, some of the benefits will be long-term like tourism and whatnot.
The gardens of Aubervilliers still haven't been brought back and despite promises, remain a waste ground.
The future of the Olympic village is in question too. For sustainability, the villages are to be converted easily into new homes. But to make a village, they ousted the poor populations there, this is a gentrification jump-start if you will. Maybe it'll become social housing for the poor, that would be neat.
All this talking is merely delaying the inevitable.
The stadium is slowly emptying, the last beats of the music have vanished in the ether.
The crowd is leaving, the lights are dimming.
It's dark now, a set of ref lights remain in the sky, getting smaller and smaller.
The last plane is gone, and Paris is once-again silent.
Silent?!?
Paris has been and always will be the city of pollution, misguided tourists and love, not necessarily in that order.
And on this note, I wish you all a wonderful year 2025.