PARIS — The new sport for the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad, which open Friday here and continue for 17 days, is breaking.
It is more commonly known as break dancing, but the dancing part has been removed, presumably, to deflect criticism and encourage its acceptance as a worthy athletic competition. It also fits the Paris Games in more semantic ways.
Because the goal, the hope, the aspiration of these Olympics, truly, is breaking.
Breaking with the recent trend of flawed Games, either from authoritarian governments (Sochi and Beijing), overwhelmed organizers (Rio de Janeiro), remote locales (Pyeongchang) or pandemic restrictions (Tokyo).
Breaking with the habit of building new venues that instantly become white elephants when the flame is extinguished at closing ceremonies.
Breaking even financially, avoiding the tsunami of cost overruns and red ink that have sunk past host cities.
Breaking with tradition, hosting the athletes’ parade before Friday’s opening ceremony on 94 barges over a four-mile stretch of the River Seine instead of monotonously marching into a stadium.
“It’s not perfect, it’s never perfect,” said Tony Estanguet, president of the Paris organizing committee and a three-time gold medalist in whitewater canoe. “I remember when I crossed the finish line when I was an athlete with the gold medal, I didn’t make a perfect run. Perfect is never the case, but it’s also important to assess what we are willing to deliver.
“We dared to be audacious, to be ambitious, to make sure the Games will not be the same as the previous editions.”
They arrive at an inflection point in the Olympic movement, with declining viewership, with increasing cynicism from doping and corruption scandals, with cities reluctant to submit host bids, with longtime sponsors departing, with rising terrorist threats, with political decisions jeopardizing its purportedly neutral image.
Paris’ great advantage, and Los Angeles in 2028, is that it isn’t using the Olympics to attract tourism or revitalize a region or launder a political ideology through the interlocking rings.
A Frenchman, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, created the modern Games in 1896 after seeing a model of ancient Olympia at the Paris Exposition. The city has hosted the Summer Games twice, in 1900 and 1924. France has hosted the Winter Games three times and will make it four in 2030 in the Alps.
The 1900 Games didn’t go so well, spread over five months with a litany of obscure sports such as equestrian high jump and a swimming obstacle race where competitors dove under a row of boats in the Seine.
Paris got another shot in 1924 and began shaping the current Olympics, introducing the “Citius, altius, fortius” motto (faster, higher, stronger) and a dedicated athlete village of wooden shacks. Johnny Weissmuller won two gold medals in swimming before starring as Tarzan in Hollywood movies. Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi took home five golds in track and field.
This, then, is about reshaping the Olympics. Resuscitating, revitalizing, reimagining, rebooting them.
“Light up people’s hearts,” French President Emmanuel Macron says.
One thing that hasn’t changed from 1900 is swimming in the River Seine. The swimming competition was held there back then, which the competitors liked because a) the river wasn’t as polluted then and b) the strong current meant world record times.
France spent $1.5 billion in a massive clean-up campaign in order to stage a triathlon leg and marathon swimming there, with mixed reviews. A protest movement with the threat #JeChieDansLaSeine (literally, “I poop in the Seine”) claims the water quality is still unhealthy, prompting Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo to take a dip herself in wetsuit and goggles.
Other venues, most of them in cost-efficient existing or temporary structures, have equally historic and photogenic backdrops.
Beach volleyball is in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, fencing and taekwondo in a renovated Grand Palais, skateboarding and breaking at Place de la Concorde, equestrian at the Chateau de Versailles, judo and wrestling at the Champ de Mars exhibition hall, the marathon start at Hotel de Ville, the road cycling course up Montmartre hill past the Sacre-Coeur basilica, tennis on the famed red clay of Roland-Garros.
Surfing is on a reef break off the French Polynesian island of Tahiti. Sailing is on the Cote d’Azur in Marseille.
The Olympic flame will be displayed not in a stadium but Jardin des Tuileries,a palace garden created by Catherine de Medici in the 1500s on the fashionable Right Bank of the Seine not far from the Louvre Museum.
“It’s been very rich,” Christophe Dubi, the Olympic Games executive director for the IOC, said of their journey with the Paris organizing committee, “with people that always had this attitude of, ‘Let’s create, let’s innovate, although Paris offers a lot of history and culture, let’s use this to make it something very special.’”
It’s not perfect, as Estanguet says, it’s never perfect. Not when you bring 11 million visitors to see 10,714 athletes from 206 nations compete in 329 events over 754 sessions in 35 venues.
The biggest challenge is security in a city that has suffered several major terrorist attacks, including one in 2015 that killed 130 people and was attributed to the Islamic State as retaliation for French air strikes in Syria and Iraq.
The result is what is considered the largest peacetime security operation in French history, with 45,000 officers drawn from police, military and dozens of foreign countries. In the past few days, groups of uniformed soldiers have appeared on street corners with guns slung across their chests while police are regularly posted at Metro stations. Speed boats with armed officers zoom up and down the Seine. Divers patrol beneath the surface.
A no-fly zone with a 100-mile radius will be imposed from 6:30 p.m. to midnight during opening ceremonies, forcing commercial airlines to cancel flights into area airports. Drones have been banned, and police estimate they are intercepting six per day, most by unknowing tourists.
France’s interior minister said more than 4,000 Olympic credentials have been rejected on suspicion of being foreign spies or having radical Islamist ties. On Tuesday, authorities raided the Paris apartment of a 40-year-old, Russian-born chef, alleging he was “conducting intelligence work on behalf of a foreign power … to provoke hostilities in France” through a large-scale attack during the Games.
There also was a YouTube video posted this week of a masked person claiming Hamas would turn Paris into “rivers of blood” in retaliation for France’s support of Israel’s invasion of Gaza. French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal has since questioned its validity.
“We’re not sure,” Attal told media, “but it looks like it is fake and has been spread by pro-Kremlin and pro-Russian channels.”
The other fear is a crippling Russian-backed cyberattack on Games-related computer systems. The Russian team has been banned from the Olympics as punishment for the invasion of Ukraine, although some individual Russian athletes are allowed to compete independently with no national association.
All this plays out amid the backdrop of political instability in France. Macron dissolved the National Assembly last month and called for snap elections, with no party receiving a majority of seats to form a new government without creating a coalition. Attal has resigned but agreed to stay on through the Games operating a government without the power to pass laws.
But the Games must go on. They always do.
The hope is the athletes come to the rescue and provide the ultimate diversion: Simone Biles in gymnastics, Katie Ledecky in the pool, LeBron James on the basketball court, 400-meter hurdler Sydney McLauglin-Levrone on the track, along with French stars like swimmer Leon Marchand, rugby player Antoine Dupont and 7-foot-4 NBA rookie Victor Wembayama.
The $10 billion budget, thanks to strong ticket sales and only a handful of new venues, so far is manageable. The Olympic rings hang majestically from the Eiffel Tower. Pollution levels in the Seine remain low. The famed Gallic indifference of Parisians appears to be waning. The opening ceremony dancers called off a threatened strike after receiving a new pay offer.
There are reports that Celine Dion and Lady Gaga will partner on a duet of a 1940s song by French singer Edith Piaf, “La Vie en rose.”
A rough translation: Life in rosy hues.
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