The Risky Bets of the Paris Olympics Paid off. Who Can Claim the Win?

The Washington Post / Rick Noack

13:19 JST, August 12, 2024

PARIS – France’s plan for the 2024 Olympics was a gamble fraught with risks. For the most part, the big bets paid off.

Before the Games got underway, there were concerns about potential terrorist attacks, cyberattacks, crowd crushes, labor strikes, political tensions, heat waves, bedbugs and the viability of hosting swimming competitions in the Seine. It didn’t help that a different daring gamble by President Emmanuel Macron – to stake his party’s future on early legislative elections – resulted in political chaos as international athletes and fans were about to arrive.

Polling by Ifop, an international polling and market research firm, in mid-July found more than two-thirds of adults in France were indifferent, worried or angry about the coming Olympic Games. When Ipsos surveyed 33 countries about their enthusiasm for the Olympics, France was near the bottom of the charts.

And yet well before the Closing Ceremonies at the Stade de France on Sunday, the chorus of critics had hushed.

Paris managed to awe visitors and viewers with spectacular venues, which showcased some of the city’s most familiar sites in breathtakingly unfamiliar ways. These Olympics welcomed spectators back for the first time since the pandemic, and the roar of the crowds witnessing athletic feats pumped new energy into the capital. Some Parisians who had left on vacation decided to return so they wouldn’t miss out.

“It has been the perfect Games for Paris, for France, and – if you want – for Macron,” said French political scientist Dominique Moïsi. Even Macron’s low approval ratings have ticked upward slightly.

To be sure, not everything went smoothly. An investigation remains open into the arson attacks on high-speed rail lines the night before the Opening Ceremonies. Olympic athletes and organizers also reported receiving threats and online harassment.

After torrential rain elevated pollution levels in the Seine – overpowering the 1.4 billion-euro ($1.5-billion) cleanup project – some training sessions were canceled and the triathlon was delayed.

But the nightmare scenarios never materialized.

“We French, we like to complain. But honestly, right now everything that’s happening is rather positive,” said political researcher Pierre Mathiot, sounding surprisingly cheerful for someone who spent the past months analyzing France’s impending political doom.

So who should get the credit for the success of the Paris Olympics?

The Games involved a gargantuan effort by more than 4,000 officials, 45,000 volunteers, 35,000 police and gendarmerie officers, 18,000 French soldiers and 1,800 foreign law enforcement personnel. And their work isn’t done. The Paralympic Games begin Aug. 28.

But in this interlude, it seems fair to ask: Who are the winners who haven’t been on podiums?

Macron has sought to be a contender. Although the Paris Olympic bid was in motion before he was elected, he embraced it from the start of his presidency, flying to Lausanne, Switzerland, to lobby the International Olympic Committee in July 2017. The vision would be audacious, he promised, and well worth it, he said.

Macron played only a cameo role in the July 26 Opening Ceremonies. But he wasn’t shy about embracing athletes after their victories – or wiping away their tears.

Throughout the Games, he posted I-told-you-so updates on social media. “The brief? Make it iconic,” he wrote alongside a video of beach volleyball at the Eiffel Tower.

Under different circumstances, these Olympics could have been a triumph for Macron, helping to cement his legacy and propel his vision of France as an international player that punches above its weight. But even if the Games have boosted France’s global image and soft power, they appear to have given Macron only a slight lift domestically, and his recently weakened political position may constrain his international clout.

Amid France’s political turmoil, Macron’s maneuvering to be photographed with Olympic athletes was a step too far for some. “The president is certainly playing his role as president when he celebrates French victories that make an entire country proud,” journalist Bérengère Bonte wrote for Radio France. “The risk is that he appears as the one who comes to pick up the laurels almost alone, who continues to play politics when he has asked everyone for a truce.”

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo is another person who put her reputation on the line for these Olympics. And, like Macron, she has claimed victory over the doubters and the haters.

“After years of criticism aimed at me, years of tearing down a positive image of Paris,” she said in an interview with Le Monde published Tuesday, “something incredibly positive is happening.”

Hidalgo used Paris’s hosting of the Olympics as an argument to advance efforts to limit car traffic, extend bike lanes and open more space for pedestrians. The program has been polarizing among Parisians. But a mostly car-free Olympics proved popular among visitors – a credit to the mayor.

Hidalgo’s boldest Olympic project was the Seine cleanup. Because the city’s sewage system regularly overflowed into the river, swimming had been officially banned since 1923. Reclaiming the Seine to meet modern safety standards was no small feat.

On July 17, she declared that the river was ready and plunged in herself to demonstrate. Only later did test results reveal that E. coli levels were slightly above the safe limit that day.

The Olympic events went ahead. But it was touch-and-go – leaving some people unconvinced that cleaning the Seine was worth the hefty price tag.

Belgian triathlete Claire Michel ultimately said it was a virus and not bacteria from the water that made her sick after a swim. But Belgium’s Olympic committee said in a statement that it hoped “lessons will be learned” for future Olympics. “We are thinking here of the guarantee of training days, competition days and the competition format which must be clarified in advance and ensure that there is no uncertainty for the athletes, their entourage and the supporters,” the committee said.

Hidalgo’s moment of truth among voters may only come next summer, when the city has vowed to make sections of the Seine swimmable by the public. In the first 10 days of the Olympics, the Seine would have had to be closed for public swimming 90 percent of the time due to pollution, according to data assessed by French news outlet Mediapart.

Even riskier than the Seine cleanup was the plan to stage the Opening Ceremonies on the river, rather than in the comparatively controlled confines of a stadium. Paris has been the target of terrorist attacks before. And these Olympics were taking place at an especially tense geopolitical moment.

“If there are gold medals that are distributed to athletes, there is a gold medal to be given to French police and gendarmes,” Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said at a news conference on Friday. (He agreed to stay on through the Games even though Macron’s cabinet formally resigned after last month’s election.)

There was a moment of shock on the morning of the Opening Ceremonies, when suspected sabotage disrupted France’s high-speed railway network.

“Was it embarrassing? Absolutely,” said Hans-Jakob Schindler, senior director of the Counter Extremism Project. “But was it a security threat to the Olympics and its participants? Absolutely not.”

“They’ve done a fairly good job at making sure that everyone at the Games was safe,” he said.

That’s good for Darmanin’s record – which had been tarnished by the 2022 Champions League final at the Stade de France, where poor crowd management resulted in dangerous congestion and police in riot gear deploying tear gas.

Paris deputy mayor Pierre Rabadan said the Olympics had given French police an opportunity to increase public trust.

“The relationship with the police has really evolved positively,” he said. “Usually, with the police, we are often in a relationship of conflict or concern. Here, we had police officers who provided information, who guided.”

As the President of the Paris 2024 organizing committee, Tony Estanguet may have the best chances of being seen as a winner of these Games. The former French slalom canoeist and three-time Olympic gold medalist was assigned to ensure that the Games aligned with the original French bid, the budget and the International Olympic Committee’s rules.

Paris managed to contain costs by minimizing new construction. With an estimated price tag of around $9.7 billion for both the Olympics and the Paralympics, the competitions are less expensive than London’s ($16.8 billion), Rio’s ($23.6 billion) and Tokyo’s (over $13.7 billion), though inflation has made this year more expensive than expected.

“Together, we have experienced Games like nothing the world has seen before,” Estanguet said in a speech at the Closing Ceremonies. “From one day to the next, time stood still and a whole country got goose bumps. From one day to the next, Paris became a party again, and France came back together.”

But that unity may be fleeting.

The excitement and enthusiasm generated by global sports events, Moïsi said, tend to be “very intense, and very short.”

As a result of the Olympics, “politics just disappeared” for two weeks, Mathiot said. The French far-right even largely stayed out of the debate over whether a possible “Last Supper” reference in the Opening Ceremonies was offensive. “They realized the zeitgeist was playing against them during that period,” Moïsi said.

Now that the Olympics are over, though, pressure will mount for Macron to name a new prime minister and share power. Taunts from the right and the left will resume.

Moïsi compared the current political moment to 1998, when then-President Jacques Chirac was briefly boosted by the first-ever French victory at the soccer World Cup and commentators declared France’s multicultural team a “model of integration.”

“But it didn’t last long,” Moïsi said. Chirac remained a lame duck for much of the remainder of his first term, and France’s racial divides persisted.

France’s political impasse, cautioned Mathiot, “is going to reemerge, and it will do so very forcefully.”