Paris was already lousy with sweaty summertime fanny-packers–now the Olympics? An infamously gauche spectacle, a daily circus of athleticism, corporatism and tourism? Rings hitched to the Eiffel Tower? Swimming in the stinky Seine? Public displays of enthusiasm? Quelle horreur.
The negative vibes didn’t last a week. Really, they barely survived opening night, after the square-jawed French soccer god Zinedine Zidane held the torch in the cinematic nighttime rain. The fussy City of Light couldn’t help but swoon.
By the second weekend, Paris was beset with Olympic mania. There was fever for homegrown talent — golden swimmer Léon Marchand; mountain bike champ Pauline Ferrand-Prévot; table tennis phenom Felix LeBrun; judo king Teddy Riner.
Signs of local buy-in abounded: arenas rippling with French flags; Gendarmerie assisting befuddled travelers; bistro TVs replaying handball highlights deep into the night. There were crepes at beach volleyball; Ladurée macarons topped with Paris 2024 logos; on-site Olympic smoking sections, still doing robust business.
Paris’s alleged Summer Games ennui? It never stood a chance.
“We saw ourselves as a nation of chronic complainers,” Paris 2024 boss Tony Estanguet said at Sunday’s closing ceremony. “We woke up in a country of unbridled sports fans who can’t stop singing.”
In a way, what happened in Paris happened everywhere, including in the U.S. These Games arrived amid a turbulent summer, counterprogramming to another acrid season of politics and cynicism. An exhausted country quickly fell in love–with American winning, of course, but also with the global stories of athlete unknowns and their perseverance.
The numbers don’t lie. NBC’s U.S. television ratings were excellent, surging to more than 30 million a session. It was a flashback to the old monoculture, when we would watch and rally around one thing. This time it was the exploits of Katie Ledecky and Simone Biles, Gabby Thomas and Lauren Scruggs, Kristen Faulkner and Cole Hocker, Raygun the Underwhelming Australian Breakdancer and Penn State’s beloved, bespectacled Pommel King, Stephen Nedoroscik.
To be clear: The Olympics remain a messy, bloated affair, historically marred by extravagance and corruption, to say nothing of inexplicable decision making.
France experienced whiffs of the madness, including this weekend, when the International Olympic Committee affirmed the Court of Arbitration for Sports’s baffling decision to revoke U.S. gymnast’s Jordan Chiles’s bronze medal due to an absurd technicality–the U.S. protesting a scoring decision a handful of seconds too late. (Team USA says they did protest on time, and plans to appeal.)
If I were Chiles, I’d say I lost the medal going for a celebratory swim in the Seine. Tell the pooh-bahs they can try and find it in the murk.
Throughout, these Paris Games had an exuberant advantage: people. The two prior Olympics, Tokyo 2020 (delayed to 2021) and Beijing 2022, were empty, bleak competitions held under Covid restrictions. As someone who covered those dreary predecessors, it was a blast to look around nearly every Paris stadium and see it filled to the rafters, from the gorgeous fencing cave inside Grand Palais to the ’70s soccer bunker Parc de Princes, shaking in the men’s soccer final versus Spain:
Allez les Bleus!
Allez les Bleus!
Allez les Bleus!
The singing, cheering and shameless boosterism is still ringing in my ears. Who would have thought: there’s a little SEC football in Paris.
In the end, the athletes are the story, of course. You can dress up an Olympic fortnight with cameos like Celine Dion and Snoop Dogg but no star is brighter than the athlete seizing the moment, especially one who has toiled away in obscurity and austerity. It’s nice that the brilliant Steph Curry won gold, but it’s hard to beat Hocker’s underdog charge in the men’s 1,500 meters, squeezing through the inside to topple the race’s assumed favorites. Or Faulkner, the Alaskan bike racer who didn’t know how to clip into bike pedals just a few years ago, taking home a pair of golds for Team USA.
There are tons of athletes like that, too many to count. Some of it already feels like a century ago: remember “Nadalcaraz?” Emotional scenes were constant: St. Lucia winning its first medal (a gold!) via 100-meter sprinter Julien Alfred; Cuban wrestling giant Mijain López retiring after his fifth gold; the German cycling team loaning a track bike to Nigeria’s Ese Ukpeseraye after she was unable to secure her own.
Olympic spirit can be corny but irresistible: witness the scene at beach volleyball, when, amid an on-court spat between Canadian and Brazilian players, the stadium DJ began playing John Lennon’s “Imagine,” diffusing the tension and lightening the mood.
These stories are just a sliver of it, I know. There are oodles of names and sagas missing from this column. Where is Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone? Jennifer Valente? Noah Lyles? Ilona Maher? Lindsey Horan? Lee Kiefer? Rai Benjamin? Haley Batten? The U.S. Rowing men’s four? Imane Khelif? Mondo Duplantis? Zheng Qinwen? Is the Journal biking dork going to mention double golds by Remco Evenepoel? Or Tom Pidcock? Who is going to give deserved flowers to A’ja Wilson?
It’s futile to fully chronicle the Olympics–and the incoming Paralympics, which start in Paris on Aug. 28–but that’s also the magic.
Besides, the power to confer Olympic fame is increasingly sliding over to the viewing public, through social media. We used to have to wait for the Wheaties box, or Bud Greenpan’s elegant documentaries, but now stardom arrives instantly, via the Internet, before even live TV can catch up.
Paris was the first true “Meme Olympics,” minting viral sensations of everyone from the Pommel King to the Casual Turkish Marksman to Rachael “Raygun” Gunn, the 36-year-old cultural studies PhD whose meh breakdance routine became global comic relief–audiences comparing Gunn’s moves to everything from “Seinfeld”’s Elaine Benes to a cat trying to wiggle out of a holiday sweater.
It was a lot–and Paris will be a hard act to follow for the 2028 host, Los Angeles. The City of Angels took the flag in Sunday’s closing, the actual 62-year-old Tom Cruise rappelling from the roof of Stade de France to do the honors (take that, A.I.!) The L.A. sneak preview featuring a beach-side Snoop and the Red Hot Chili Peppers was the stuff of France’s nightmares: gaudy, showbizzy, over the top. In other words: very L.A.
Can a self-regarding town of sunshine, stardust and superhero sequels deliver? After two weeks of navigating the seamless Metro, I’m already having pre-2028 anxiety about freeway gridlock and valet parking.
I suspect Los Angeles will find a way. Not-so-aloof Paris left a proud blueprint. The Olympic Games are imperfect, but they are very hard to beat.
Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com