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Bravo, Paris — city delivers an Olympics 2024 of athletic and cultural splendour

Bravo, Paris — city delivers an Olympics 2024 of athletic and cultural splendour
Remco Evenepoel of Belgium breaks away as the men’s road race passes through the Côte de la Butte Montmartre, while fans cheer. Photo: David Ramos/Getty Images
Craig Ray
By Craig Ray
11 Aug 2024
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It’s fair to say that, on many scores, the 33rd Olympiad was a roaring success. Paris, take a bow.

In 1924, when Paris hosted the Olympic Games for a second time, there were medals for poetry, sculpture and art, as well as many athletic endeavours.

The notion that sport and culture are closely entwined was central to the French way of thinking at the time, and although the cultural events have fallen away over the years, that spirit of the two themes persists in French society.

Which is why, when Paris bid to host the 2024 Games, central to its plan was to incorporate as many of the city’s cultural landmarks as possible. The idea was to include the city in events and to put events in the city – to again intertwine sport and culture.

Paris only built one new venue for the 2024 Games: the Aquatic Centre adjacent to Stade de France in the northern suburb of Saint-Denis. It has four pools and was built from eco-friendly materials. Its timber structure and roof frame were designed to blend seamlessly into the surrounding greenery.

With a 5,000-square-metre roof covered with photovoltaic panels, it will be one of France’s largest urban solar farms and supply all the energy the centre needs. After the Games, it will be converted from a 5,000-seat Olympic venue to a 2,500-seat community venue.

Paris’s plan to include city landmarks was ambitious and fraught with obstacles in a modern world where cities gridlock when a car has a breakdown and where the threat of terrorism is a reality.

But Paris went for it. If the Games were to be in Paris, then Paris was going to be a feature of the Olympics. It’s fair to say that, on that score, and many others, the 33rd Olympiad was a roaring success.

Ambition to show off


Nothing underlined Paris’s ambition more than hosting an opening ceremony over 5.5km along the Seine river instead of in the Olympic stadium. The show itself garnered controversy because some of its themes of diversity and humanity missed the mark with a wider international audience, but the actual accomplishment of pulling off the ceremony must be applauded.

Paris gambled with the weather, too, and lost as it poured for much of the four-hour opening spectacle. But it was worth it. It showcased France both old and new and it provoked audiences.

Isn’t that what art is supposed to do? Isn’t sport, in its own way, provocative?

The opening ceremony opened the world to Paris’s ambition. This wasn’t going to be an ordinary Olympics played out only in newly minted arenas. It was going to show off Paris at every opportunity.

The Eiffel Tower became a backdrop to beach volleyball and cycling, the Palace of Versailles, appropriately, hosted equestrian events, perhaps the most 19th century of all Olympic sports.

The Grand Palais, a towering, wondrous structure set between the Seine and the Champs-Élysées, was the backdrop for fencing, another 19th-century sport from the original modern Games. Taekwondo was also held under its barrel-vaulted glass roof.

Pont Alexander III, built for the 1900 World’s Fair, with its golden statues representing commerce, science, industry and the arts, was the start and finish to the triathlon, open-water swimming and the cycling’s time trials. Nearby Place de la Concorde, where Marie Antoinette was beheaded, and which connects the Champs-Élysées to the Tuileries Garden and the Louvre Museum, featured skateboarding, sport climbing, breaking and 3x3 basketball.

Paris Remco Evenepoel of Belgium breaks away as the men’s road race passes through the Côte de la Butte Montmartre on 3 August 2024. (Photo: David Ramos / Getty Images)



Archers shot their arrows under the golden dome of Les Invalides, which is home to Napoleon’s tomb and an attraction for military enthusiasts. Roland-Garros welcomed tennis and the Stade de France, which has hosted two Rugby World Cups and was originally built for the 1998 Soccer World Cup, first hosted rugby sevens and then athletics. Its eye-catching lavender Mondo track made a stadium that is nearly three decades old look young and vibrant.

And the Seine itself, despite some problems and a R27.9-billion price tag for filtration stations and measures such as wastewater infrastructure to contain sewage and minimise spillage into the waterway, was used.

Competition highlights


What all these magnificent backdrops needed was equally stunning athletic performances – and the Games delivered.

French swimmer Léon Marchand claimed four gold medals for the host nation in the pool. Rugby superstar Antoine Dupont won gold with the French sevens team at Stade de France, where nine months earlier the Boks broke his and French hearts at Rugby World Cup 2023.

American Noah Lyles took the men’s 100m title in the fastest race yet. The slowest of the eight competitors, Oblique Saville from Jamaica, ran 9.91s. South Africa’s own ­Akani Simbine finished a heartbreaking fourth in a national record of 9.82s.

Novak Djokovic won the men’s singles tennis title, thus completing the career “golden slam”, and gymnastics great Simone Biles made a triumphant return to lead Team USA to the all-round artistic title.

Fourteen-year-old Australian Arisa Trew won the women’s park skateboarding, and the brilliant Ugandan Joshua Cheptegei won the men’s 10,000m in an Olympic record. South Africa’s Adriaan Wildschutt smashed the old Olympic record by 10 seconds in the same race.

South Africa’s Tatjana Smith won two medals: gold in the 100m breaststroke and silver in her more favoured 200m breaststroke. Cyclist Alan Hatherly took a wonderful bronze in the men’s mountain bike cross-country, and the Blitzboks also took bronze in the rugby sevens.

Read more: Olympic Games Paris 2024

But perhaps no event epitomised Paris’s goal of combining the city and athletics better than the road race cycling.

Both the men’s and women’s races, after departing from central Paris and taking in landmarks such as Notre Dame and the Musée d’Orsay, headed into the northwestern countryside before returning for their climax in the inner city.

The races reached their peak through the tight, cobbled streets of Montmartre, with several laps through the iconic district, noted as a home to artists and creators. The sight of Belgian superstar Remco Evenepoel thrashing his bike up the steep slopes towards the Basilica of Sacré Coeur with thousands of people, 10 deep in places, screaming encouragement was memorable.

There was no entry fee and after several laps through the throngs in Montmartre the races ended under the Eiffel Tower.

It was the perfect snapshot of an Olympic Games that brought back a cultural element to the sporting extravaganza, which might never be repeated. Bravo, Paris. Merci. DM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw5xlvbiBPI

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.


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