More sober, more ecological, more sustainable, united, inclusive, accessible… The organizers of Paris 2024 have constructed a narrative tending to show that these Olympic Games mark the entry into a new, more reasonable era.
Behind this narration – this storytelling – we cannot deny a desire to move forward, thanks to the event, on a certain number of subjects which we had sometimes hardly cared about before. But, politically, this discourse also aims, in part, to make more presentable and to sell as well as possible a product which, if it remains the biggest sporting event in the world in terms of the media, no longer necessarily arouses the support of public opinion. – as proof, the candidate cities for the organization of the Olympic Games are less and less numerous.
Therefore, this marketing can be heckled by reality or certain facts. To the point of requiring a few inflections and other more or less complicated dialectic sequences. We have seen this recently on the dimension ” more ecological “. While Paris 2024 boasted “the first Games with a positive contribution to the climate”the Organizing Committee has just abandoned this slogan, as has the reference to the “carbon neutral”. “It is not scientifically reasonable”, acknowledged the Cojop, whose message is now to “halving the carbon footprint” compared to previous editions.
The boomerang of “popular” games
In another field, that of ticketing, it is the qualifier ” popular “ who came back boomerang. If the commercial success is there (6.8 million tickets sold out of the 10 million that will be offered), the organizers have “crowded” in the face of criticism over a lottery system that has seen many people unable to access the places they dreamed of, or not being able to afford those offered to them.
The government and the communities linked to the Games have stepped up to repeat that this dimension will be ensured through the million tickets they will distribute free of charge. The Minister of Sports and Games, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, recalled that ticketing could only be popular within certain limits: it is one of the three pillars of the Paris 2024 budget and must therefore generate substantial income.
Since we are talking about the budget, the slogan phrases “The Games finance the Games”, “There will be no OJ tax” – way of saying that the State is not intended to absorb a deficit of Paris 2024 –, do not correspond entirely to reality either: taxpayers’ money is already used to finance the event (excluding construction sites). At the end of 2022, to balance the Paris 2024 budget, the State and communities added more than 110 million euros to the 100 million they had already committed – not to mention the tickets purchased or the financing of the torch relay by the communities.
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