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How do Olympics blast pandemic doldrums of previous Games? With a huge Paris party.
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- How do Olympics blast pandemic doldrums of previous Games? With a huge Paris party.
PARIS — One year from today, thousands of Olympic athletes will board more than 160 boats on the Seine River with their countrymen and women, carrying their flags and wearing their national colors to signal not only the opening of the 2024 Summer Olympics, but also what they hope is an end to the Games of the COVID era.
There is no guarantee of course that COVID is as done with us as we are with it, and there always are many other worries for Olympic organizers that have nothing to do with a global pandemic.
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But there is also an overwhelming sense that Olympic luck might be turning a corner. After the necessary restrictions and rules at the Tokyo and Beijing Games, combined with the trepidation and emptiness that accompanied them, there is no better place on earth for the Olympics to burst out of their doldrums than Paris.
It's not just because Paris is, well, Paris. (Actually, on second thought, that might be enough.) It's also because Paris and the Olympics go back a long way. Paris hosted the second Games of the modern Olympic era in 1900, then came right back to host them again in 1924. One hundred years later, here they are again, becoming only the second city on earth to host three Summer Olympics (London was the first and Los Angeles will become the third in 2028.)
"There's a lot of expectations around Paris," Olympic organizing committee CEO Etienne Thobois said last month during an interview at the Paris 2024 headquarters. "We want a huge party. We want the party to be extraordinary."
The party definitely will start with a bang, with the first Olympic opening ceremony ever to be held on water. Paris would not be Paris without the Seine, nor apparently would these Olympic Games, so to the Seine the athletes will go, steaming along for more than 3 1/2 miles, heading straight for the Eiffel Tower and unloading at the Trocadero, where the rest of the opening ceremony will unfold.
A view of the Eiffel Tower along the Seine.
This is a fabulous way to begin the Games, and the views will be stunning (even the artists' renditions are breathtaking), but it's also going to require a comprehensive security effort of absolutely massive proportions. It's one thing to protect a stadium full of athletes and spectators for several hours. It's quite another to secure the most famous river in the world, miles of it, on what will be one of the most scintillating nights in Parisian history.
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"I don't think there is one square centimeter that we haven't visited many times," Thobois said about opening ceremony security. "We're really looking at every aspect of this. It took years of pre-study before we decided to go, and when we pushed the button, it was because we were sure that with the public authorities, we will have the ability to secure the opening ceremony. It's a big challenge, definitely."
Speaking of the Seine, athletes will not only be floating on top of it, some will also be swimming in it. This is quite a development considering that swimming in the Seine has not been allowed since 1923 because the water was so polluted. Next year, thanks to a massive $1.5-billion clean-up, the Olympic open-water swimming events, including the triathlon, will take place in the Seine. And after the Games end, swimming in the Seine will no longer be forbidden, one of the Games' enduring legacies if all goes according to plan.
The Seine isn't the only tourist stop to become an Olympic venue. Paris itself gets the honors in the form of the route for the men's and women's marathons. From the starting line at the Hotel de Ville, past the Louvre, along the Seine, by the Eiffel Tower and onto Versailles, the course reads like a visitor's dream tour. Bucking tradition, the women's marathon will be given the honor to be run on the final day of the Olympics. Usually the men get to close the show, but not this time.
Not all is entirely rosy for Paris, however. Late last month, law enforcement authorities raided 2024 Olympic headquarters in connection with two separate corruption investigations, searching for documents and information as they investigate allegations of favoritism, conflicts of interest and misuse of funds. The 2024 organizing committee said it has "adopted stringent procedures" including setting up "an ethics committee together with an audit committee to supervise its activities."
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If these kinds of controversies were a medal sport, most organizing committees for most Olympic Games would have long since won the gold. That's not to say this is acceptable, because it certainly is not, but the point is that it's not unusual.
At least free societies and democracies actually tell us about their problems. We'll never know what potential graft and corruption we never heard about in the run-up to the two Beijing Olympics in 2008 and 2022, as well as Vladimir Putin's 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, where a cool $51 billion exchanged hands.
Back to sports. For the first time in history, a Summer Olympics will be held just three years after the last one. Because the 2020 Tokyo Games were postponed to 2021, athletes don't have to wait as long for their next Olympics, which likely means more will try again for 2024, and more familiar faces might make it.
Not only are they looking forward to another opportunity to compete, they are longing for something they didn't have in Tokyo: normalcy. Just a normal, non-COVID Olympics.
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"It'll be fun to have family there again, friends, fans, and just everyone will get that full Olympic experience I hope," said seven-time Olympic swimming gold medalist Katie Ledecky, who is definitely planning to be there.
So Paris, you're up. You're famous. You're old. You're beautiful. You've done this before. You're perfect for the role.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 2024 Paris Olympics party should free Games from old pandemic doldrums
