Olympic-sized headaches a problem for Paris
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Many governments still believe that hosting major sporting contests commands significant prestige, yet that assessment may be sorely tested with the huge challenges facing the ongoing Olympic Games in Paris.
The event got off to a very difficult start on Friday due to the sabotage of key railway lines into the French capital. The opening ceremony also took place in heavy rain.
Beyond this, the French event is facing a wide array of risks, including major security concerns. So much so that significant changes were made to scale back the original plans for the opening ceremony along the Seine. The initial plan to welcome up to 600,000 people to first come, first served viewing locations was axed. Instead it became a much safer, invite-only occasion for about 300,000.
Moreover, the event has also faced significant controversy for religious reasons. One example is that French competitors will be banned from wearing hijabs or any form of religious headgear in sports like volleyball, football and basketball.
This decision has been slammed by bodies such as Amnesty International for undermining inclusivity and discriminating against Muslim athletes. Amnesty asserted that: “French authorities made it emphatically and unashamedly clear … that their proclaimed efforts at improving gender equality and inclusivity in sports do not apply to one group of women and girls, those Muslim women and girls who wear religious head coverings.”
To cap this off, France also still has a caretaker government after this month’s parliamentary elections saw no single bloc winning an overall majority. Amid continuing infighting, French President Emmanuel Macron has called for a “political truce” during the Olympics, delaying the appointment of a prime minister and the formation of a new government until after the Games.
Paris is thus the latest big city to be plagued by political and wider risks and controversies, underlining the massive challenges associated with such large-scale sporting events nowadays. Little wonder that the operating costs associated with running them, including maintaining security, are so huge.
This experience was most recently faced by China, as the 2022 Winter Olympics were threatened by COVID-19 outbreaks across the nation just days before the Lunar New Year, China’s annual travel holiday. These Games also faced a diplomatic boycott by multiple Western countries, including the US, UK and Australia, over human rights concerns.
While the challenges facing the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics may have been the largest of any sporting event of modern times, there were also prevalent problems at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. This event was postponed for a full year, meaning it was held in 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Even then, a state of emergency was in effect in Tokyo and nine other regions for weeks beforehand and overseas fans were barred from attending.
Macron has called for a ‘political truce’ during the Olympics and delayed the formation of a new government.
Andrew Hammond
Key members of the Tokyo organizing committee were also caught up in a corruption scandal, while polls at the time showed a solid majority of Japanese were opposed to the event going ahead. One of the biggest sponsors, Toyota, pulled its TV ads, while a host of athletes tested positive for the coronavirus.
Looking back even further, the Brazil 2016 Summer Olympics offers another stark example of the potential pitfalls of hosting major sporting events. More than 100 prominent doctors and professors wrote an open letter to the World Health Organization asking for the games to be postponed or moved from Brazil “in the name of public health” in light of the-then widening Zika virus outbreak. At the time, this was the worst health crisis facing Brazil since at least 1918, impacting many thousands of people.
Moreover, it is not just the Olympics that face these challenges. Take the example of the Euro 2016 football tournament that was awarded to France amid great fanfare in 2010, but which took place in a country operating under an official state of emergency following the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.
With the US State Department issuing a warning that the event could be a target for further terrorist atrocities — only the third time in some 20 years that such cautionary advice had been issued by the US government for European travel — the French authorities deployed some 90,000 police, soldiers and security guards, comparable to the levels of security at the 2024 Olympics.
Despite the fact that hosting major sporting events continues to be seen as a source of national pride, growing evidence indicates that they do not generally provide a substantial economic boost from stimuli like capital investment or tourism. For instance, many of the visitors tend to come from the host country and their spending often simply displaces that on other domestic leisure services. And the legacy value can be limited, with many facilities built at great cost simply becoming white elephant projects that fall into disuse.
Despite all these pitfalls, however, it is noticeable that several cities have expressed an interest in hosting the 2036 Summer Olympics. This will follow Los Angeles in 2028 and Brisbane in 2032.
For the foreseeable future at least, the perception that hosting big sporting events is a major symbol of national prestige will continue to supersede the headaches that can come with staging them. However, that tide may yet turn and the next couple of weeks in France could potentially be key to that calculation.
- Andrew Hammond is an Associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics.
