Can Paris Save the Olympics?

On one of the first warm spring evenings in May, in cafes and offices and on boulevards across Paris, thousands of smartphones started buzzing in unison. 

Inside the No. 9 metro, rush-hour passengers scrambled to check their messages—then rolled their eyes. “IMPORTANT,” read the alert. “Message from the Interior Ministry regarding the security perimeter for the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics.”

The official purpose of the communication was to make locals aware of a QR code they will need to access vast swaths of the city during the Olympic Games, which descend on the French capital from July 26 to August 11. But for many Parisians, the high-pitched interruption was little more than an unwelcome reminder that the Olympics is coming.

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A running joke in France is that the national pastime isn’t soccer or rugby or even pétanque. It’s complaining. And even by that lofty standard, the Games’ imminent arrival has raised the usual griping to historic levels, as picture-postcard corners of Paris have been overrun by construction crews and locals prepare a mass exodus during the chaos of les Jeux.

The Place de la Concorde, once home to a public guillotine, now houses an even more incongruous installation: a miniature campus for the Olympics’ “urban park,” where 25,000 people a day will fill the blue plastic seats for skateboarding, BMX cycling, breakdancing and 3-on-3 basketball. Ornate fountains and lampposts have been boxed up in giant wooden crates to shield them from damage. Above the Concorde’s cobblestones, those hulking stands cropped up almost overnight. And below them, one of Paris’s busiest metro stations is shutting down. These are the concessions, organizers say, that must be made when turning a living museum into a functional sports arena.

A few steps away, the 124-year-old Pont Alexandre III, a gilded bridge over the Seine, has been fitted with bleachers for the Opening Ceremony, the triathlon and the finish of the road-cycling time trials, among other moments. 

To those who view them as eyesores, these installations have only intensified the grumbling. “Help! The Olympics have invaded Paris,” cried a recent op-ed in the Journal du Dimanche newspaper. “Olympics: We are not ready,” read another message projected in giant letters on the face of the Arc de Triomphe during an anti-Games protest. An April poll by the French Institute of Public Opinion found that only 48 percent of French people trusted the country to organize the Olympics successfully, down seven points since February.

But what many locals don’t realize is how high the stakes are for these Olympics—far higher than the inconvenience of crowded subways and noisy Americans for three weeks. Over the past decade, the reputation of the Olympics has taken a beating. Instead of delivering a global party every two years, its recent history has been all turmoil all the time. 

From the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics, tainted by a vast Russian doping conspiracy, to 2016’s Summer Games in Brazil—beset by budget overruns, inefficiency and a pool that mysteriously turned green—the Games’ global standing fell faster than a diver off the 10-meter board. Things devolved further during the pandemic. In 2020, the already wildly expensive and unpopular Tokyo Games were delayed by a year and then held under a cloche of intense Covid-19 protocols. Then came Beijing: empty arenas, even more invasive Covid restrictions and the uncomfortable optics of Olympics held in service to an autocratic regime. 

Viewers didn’t conceal their boredom with the whole enterprise. The 17-day Tokyo Olympics drew an average of 15.5 million prime-time television viewers in the U.S., according to NBC, making it the broadcaster’s smallest Summer Games audience since it took over the rights in 1988. It also marked a 42 percent decline since the Rio Olympics held just five years earlier. (The Winter Olympics is in even worse shape, with the Beijing Games also drawing NBC’s lowest-ever prime-time TV audience.)

After a century of waiting for the event to return to Paris for a third time, following 1900 and 1924—and a decade during which the Games lurched from crisis to fiasco to minor catastrophe—the ambition is to restore the fun, the glitz and the prestige of the Games. Whether Parisians like it or not.   

“Enough with this Games-bashing!” Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo told the city council recently. “Enough. Enough of all these buzzkills who don’t want us all to celebrate something together. We’re here and we’re doing it.”

Even if a three-week party succeeds in quieting detractors, there’s no such thing as a completely calm, trouble-free Olympics. The first time Paris hosted, in 1900, the Games took five months to complete. And even London 2012, which is held up as a paragon of what the modern, reasonable Games can be, was viewed with deep, British skepticism right up until the Opening Ceremony, as locals worried about public transit and security staffing shortages. 

Paris 2024 comes with its own specific set of concerns: the lingering threat of terrorist attacks, a creaking transit system that even the mayor admits isn’t prepared to absorb the increased traffic or the possibility of labor unrest. But France’s long history in hosting major sporting events means it’s still regarded as a relatively safe choice.

That’s why in 2017 the International Olympic Committee leapt at the chance to lock them in as a lower-maintenance, less controversial host. Both Paris and Los Angeles were bidding for 2024 until, out of nowhere, the IOC announced that it would take the rare step of awarding two Summer Olympics at once. Los Angeles agreed to handle the 2028 Games while Paris took 2024. 

“There had been permanent panic with Rio and then the pandemic with Tokyo,” says David Wallechinsky, the former president of the International Society of Olympic Historians. “The Olympic movement needed a well organized, calm Olympics.”

After the excesses of Beijing 2008, where the bill ran to an estimated $40 billion, Sochi ($50 billion), and Tokyo (more than $20 billion, according to government auditors), the Paris Olympics promised to be more reasonable, more responsible. The idea was to bring these Games back to something closer to London 2012, which, after much hand-wringing, turned into a rain-free, national celebration of Cool Britannia. The total cost in Paris has been widely reported to be around $10 billion, putting it under London and Rio, with 97 percent of the budget coming from private funding.

“Paris 2024 wants to show that there is a different way to organize the Games,” says the organizing committee president, Tony Estanguet, who won three gold medals in his former life as an Olympic canoeist for France. “Recently we’ve seen Olympics where money was no object. But for us, it’s important to be as sober as possible.”

Paris can afford to be a little more sober in dressing up the city in part because certain city planners—Louis XIV, for instance—had their own extravagant taste. You don’t have to do much to the Palace of Versailles to make it look extraordinary on television. That said, organizers did end up doing major landscape work on the grounds to make them suitable for equestrian competition after discovering the fields were on a slight slope.

These Olympics have also leaned on French history to stretch the definition of “Paris 2024” as far as it will go. Some events will be held on the outskirts of the city proper—still others as far away as Marseille, on France’s southern coast. And then there’s the surfing competition, which will take place 10,000 miles from the City of Light in the French overseas territory of Tahiti. No surfers will make the round trip to attend the Opening Ceremony.

And still, Estanguet points out, this constitutes keeping things on a more reasonable scale without sacrificing the Parisian wow-factor.

“Our hallmark,” he likes to say, “will be audacity.”  

Nothing encapsulates that audacity more than organizers’ plans to make an Olympic star out of a murky body of water that no sober Parisian would ever take a dip in—a river, in fact, where swimming has been banned for more than a century. Not only will they sail athletes on barges down the Seine in the Opening Ceremony, they will send athletes into the Seine for the triathlon and open-water swimming events. This has turned into the plan that launched a thousand headaches at Paris 2024 headquarters: Whether or not the Seine will be clean enough has turned into one of the greatest intrigues of the Paris Olympics.

Last summer, officials had to cancel the test event in the Seine due to a high concentration of bacteria in the water. As recently as February, tests found that the levels of E. coli were 20 times higher than what is allowed by World Triathlon, the sport’s governing body. That was before the city unveiled a newly built underground storage tank designed to store wastewater during heavy storms and prevent it from running into the Seine in May. As long as Paris doesn’t experience biblical downpours in July, city officials say, the river should be perfectly safe to compete in. Those who have to swim in it aren’t so sure.

“We need a plan B,” says the defending open water Olympic champion from Brazil, Ana Marcela Cunha. “The Seine is not made for swimming.”

No matter what happens, according to people familiar with the organizers’ thinking, the athletes are expected to get in the water.

The same question seems to arise with every Olympics: Who are the Games really for? Over one million tickets have been sold for people who want to attend the Paris Games, and more than 10,000 athletes are heading to France. But that’s a drop in the Seine compared with the audience of billions watching from home. In other words, the Olympics aren’t necessarily for the people at the Games. Which means a host city isn’t just a host city—it’s a giant television sound stage.

That’s a role Paris knows how to play. Every camera shot is designed to look like a postcard, says the organizing committee’s CEO Étienne Thobois. And wherever possible, venues have been dropped in front of iconic Paris landmarks. Viewers are about to be fed a nonstop carousel of shots of the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and pink sunsets over the Champs-Elysées. Paris 2024 has vastly increased the number of “beauty cams” set up in high places with the sole purpose of delivering pretty, Instagram-worthy shots of the city to broadcasters. 

“It’s going to be powerful, spectacular and dazzling,” Estanguet says. “We know that this is also about the image of the country, about tourism, and, in some way, making people say, ‘Wow, what is this country? I have to go see this.’” 

The Rio Olympics had beach volleyball on the picturesque sands of Copacabana. Paris saw that bet and raised it with a beach volleyball stadium at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. Whether or not getting there will be a tourist’s nightmare hardly matters to the audience watching around the globe. Paris has tried to mitigate potential transportation issues by urging people to work from home during the Games (seemingly forgetting that many Parisians clear out of the capital in midsummer anyway) and doubling the price of metro tickets to $4.30 for nonresidents.

It helps that Paris has been able to lean on a healthy foundation of sports infrastructure. Some 95 percent of the venues already exist, such as the Stade de France, which will host track and field, or the Bercy concert hall, for gymnastics and basketball. But the remaining 5 percent of new construction has generated a disproportionate number of the negative headlines.

The Olympic Stadium, Athletes’ Village and Aquatic Center are all located just north of the city in the département of Seine-Saint-Denis, the poorest in mainland France. Organizers have said that they hope the construction projects there will act as a stimulus to the area by extending transport links and providing more housing once the Athletes’ Village is converted into 3,000 apartments, but critics have accused the Games of disregarding the needs of longtime residents. Local activist groups have decried the loss of public spaces, the forced relocation of homeless people and the sudden whitewashing of neighborhoods that existed long before anyone worried about where the diving venue might go. 

“The history of these sports mega-events shows that there is a high risk of ‘social cleansing’ in the streets,” the collective Revers de la Médaille (Flip Side of the Medal) wrote in an open letter to the Games’ organizers. “Right now, everything leads us to believe that Paris 2024 will follow the same pattern.” 

Paris 2024 officials insist that they have acted responsibly and that the Games will pour billions of euros into the area. But Seine-Saint-Denis isn’t the only place discontent has bubbled up. Closer to the city center, signs of irritation are hiding in plain sight.

Steps from the Place de la Concorde, graffiti that has yet to be painted over captures a popular sentiment that isn’t suitable for print. Even the construction workers erecting skate parks in front of the gilded Luxor Obelisks are occasionally interrupted by passersby who most certainly won’t be buying tickets.

“People ask a lot of questions,” said Lucas Prado, a construction site manager at the Place de la Concorde. “Obviously, not all of them are happy.”

“My job is to convince people,” Tony Estanguet explains. 

During his career as an Olympic athlete, Estanguet’s job was to carry the French flag into the Opening Ceremony, paddle his canoe as hard as he could and win gold medals. Now it’s sitting in endless meetings with elected officials, broadcasters and sponsors, who are paying for all of this and will help him meet a pledge: that the Games won’t turn into yet another taxpayer-funded boondoggle. (See: Rio, Tokyo.) 

Paris hopes to set itself apart in many ways, but the most important (and rarest) distinction would be delivering the Games on budget, on time and almost entirely through private funding. In the final months before the Olympic flame is lit, organizers say, they are on track to pull it off. Securing the money took around 75 local sponsors, including huge commitments from the luxury conglomerate LVMH and the pharmaceutical giant Sanofi. But the process hasn’t always been smooth, with some of the largest backers waiting until the final 12 months before the Games to come on board.

Where they all agree is that reviving the prestige and relevance of the Olympics can help craft the image France hopes to project to the world in 2024. The country wants to be seen as the center of a sensible Europe that is able to marry an old-world taste for the finer things with a forward-thinking sense of global responsibility—all while making breakdancing an Olympic sport. Paris understands that the Games can no longer be an act of national self-indulgence for the host, exiting out of time and hitting pause on real-world issues. And it knows that these are the new standards on which it will be judged.

“You can’t organize the Games anymore without asking yourself some fundamental questions,” Estanguet says. “We have a planetary challenge here, and the Games must do their part. The Olympics aren’t going to fix everything. They’re not going to bring about world peace on their own. But they have to try to help.”

Write to Joshua Robinson at Joshua.Robinson@wsj.com