Dispatch from Paris: The Olympics of hope begin on the River Seine
PARIS—The City of Light this week has the feel of a grand, open-air, anticipatory stage for a Summer Olympics designed as bold, unique, and all-embracing. It will be a celebration of style, of the athletes, of the city itself, and—less intentionally—of democracy’s messy and inspiring resilience.
The Opening Ceremony tomorrow evening will abandon the usual constraints of a stadium for a parade of athletes down the River Seine, with boats carrying national delegations. With eighty giant screens set up around the city, and with cameras capturing the action on every vessel, the largest in-person audience ever will cheer 10,500 athletes as they make their winding, six-kilometer way to the Place du Trocadéro, with the Eiffel Tower directly facing it, for the Olympic protocol and torch lighting.
The Paris Olympics thus will serve as a refreshing, democratic (small d) antidote to several recent authoritarian-hosted Games. It will be a celebration of the individual and the freedom-drenched collective, in the country of the 1789 French Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment’s notions of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.”
The Olympics never take place in a political vacuum, and this year’s context is chilling.
By comparison, the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics unfolded just before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and just after Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin entered their bloody, “no limits” partnership. The 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics were tarnished by revelations of Russia’s state-sponsored doping program and set the stage for Russia’s annexation of Crimea. The 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics before them signaled Xi’s rise as China’s most powerful and autocratic leader since Mao Zedong, and Putin’s Russia invaded neighboring Georgia during the Games.
The Olympics never take place in a political vacuum, and this year’s context is chilling: wars in Europe and the Middle East and growing tensions in Asia, all of which contribute to the biggest threats to global order since the 1930s.
“The world is really longing for something unifying among all these tensions and confrontations,” International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach noted in a recent must-read Washington Post feature. Bach added that the Paris Olympics could be that something. Speaking last November at the United Nations, the IOC president worried that the world was in a “dangerous downward spiral . . . Political, social, and economic divisions are gaining more ground.”
The Washington Post’s Les Carpenter writes, “Many in the Olympic world are hoping these Games will do what Los Angeles did 40 years ago” at the 1984 Summer Games.
Those Olympics followed the US-led boycott, joined by more than sixty countries, of the 1980 Moscow Summer Games to protest the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. The Los Angeles Games also set the stage for one of the most dramatic expansions of democracy in history.
They transpired toward the end of US President Ronald Reagan’s first term and five short years before the Berlin Wall’s fall, which was followed by the Soviet Union’s collapse. They were a demonstration of a vibrant US democracy, full of confidence and determined to shape its times.
The games also marked a new, successful business model for the Olympic movement. They were run by a young travel executive named Peter Ueberroth, who introduced rich television deals and corporate sponsorships that produced more than two hundred million dollars in profit. The Soviets and many of their allies boycotted, and US athletes won four times more gold medals than anyone else.
It’s hard to say what legacy the Paris Games might have, though their context feels less promising than Reagan’s “morning in America.” From tomorrow through August 11, the Paris Olympics will coexist with the continued reverberations from French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for snap parliamentary elections, which resulted on July 7 in victory for the New Popular Front, a broad alliance of left-wing parties, and an unexpected defeat for the far right, with a prime minister yet to be chosen.
In the United States, a particularly divisive and decisive election will follow in November, amid an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden’s withdrawal as a candidate.
There have been worse contexts for Olympics.
In 1936, Adolf Hitler used the Berlin Games to rally fascism ahead of World War II; five Games have been cancelled due to wars; Munich’s 1972 Olympics were blighted by a terrorist attack that killed Israeli athletes. Putin has launched invasions of northern Georgia, Crimea, and eastern Ukraine during the period of “Olympic truce,” when for the week ahead of the Games and the week after world leaders agree not to attack other countries.
Here’s the 2024 backdrop: The years that followed the Los Angeles Games saw more countries than ever become democratic—a formidable wave of democracy that lasted more than two decades. This stopped around 2006, and democracy has been in relative decline since then, according to Freedom House, the V-Dem Institute, and the Atlantic Council’s own Freedom and Prosperity Indexes.
When the final medal is awarded and the last athlete departs, the Paris Olympics will likely have reflected more than shaped our geopolitical scrum. They won’t signal autocratic rise, as did those in Beijing and Moscow before them, but it’s probably too much to expect that, like Los Angeles, they will be followed by a positive wave of democratic change.
The good news is that the next five Olympic Games, including both winter and summer, are in Milan-Cortina, Los Angeles, the French Alps, Brisbane, and Salt Lake City. Each will be held in a country that democratically elects its government, and each can be a milestone to measure if democracies are on a winning trajectory.
Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.
This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.
Further reading
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Image: Before the Summer Olympics, Olympia Paris 2024, a rubber dinghy sails along the Seine.