How to do an Olympics
A 17-part guide to the Paris Games.
I’m breaking my rule about newsletter frequency because I have some semi-perishable goods on hand: A 17-day, 17-article blitz on how Paris re-invented the Olympics, with illustrations by the brilliant Logan Guo.
When Paris was preparing its bid a decade ago, the Olympics had become a bloated spectacle infamous for leaving host cities burdened with debt and useless infrastructure. An anti-Olympic revolt by activists and voters had left the IOC embarrassed, with few legitimate candidates for its flagship event. And then Paris came along with a new idea: An Olympic competition that was light on its feet. It would be sprinkled throughout the city, aligned with existing planning goals, and require few permanent new venues.
Just about every day for the past two weeks, I’ve made my way to a grand old building in Paris’s 3rd arrondissement. Some mornings, I passed crowds at the bridge railings, squinting through the sun at the swimming competitions in the Seine. But there was always a seat on the train. At Place de la République, far from the Olympic crowd, men slept on the sidewalk and volunteers gave out hot breakfast on the steps of the church nearby. The skateboarders weren’t there yet. At the cafes, the waiters were looking at their phones.
I was heading for the Carreau du Temple, a 19th-century glass-and-iron market hall that was turned into the “Paris Media Center” for the Olympic Games. Past the metal detectors was a vast, bright, vaulted space, with long shared desks and cafe tables organized around a cascading installation by the artist Jeanne Varaldi. The piece was called Paris in 42.75 kilometers, and was composed of fragments of speech from Varaldi’s walks with a group of Parisians, printed on a billowing cloth canopy.
Unlike the Olympic Media Center, the base of operations for the thousands of journalists accredited by the International Olympic Committee—the ones who submitted their paperwork more than a year in advance, and get those great seats in all the arenas—this space was set up by the City of Paris. There were thousands of us registered here, though rarely were there more than a hundred people in the hall, and the ambiance was that of a high-end co-working space on a summer Friday, hushed except for the crisp cadence of international radio journalists trying to nail their reports. The city’s top officials came in and out every morning, answering questions with an openness that I could never imagine in New York, Boston, or Chicago, and offered press tours on subjects that are sometimes hyper-relevant to the Games (cleaning up the Seine) and sometimes not (clubbing in Paris). The city was obviously proud of this investment; they brought Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass through here the other day.
As I came into the building on Saturday, helping myself to some free newspapers off the rack, I thought about the time that Jay-Z bought Zadie Smith a fish sandwich. After Smith’s T Magazine write-up of a lunch with the rapper was published in 2012, Slate’s Aisha Harris wrote to the Times to ask, cheekily, if the gift violated the paper’s ethics policy. The answer was no, one of the paper’s standards editors wrote, because the “rules recognize that in some situations it may be unavoidable to accept a modest level of hospitality.”
Certainly I accepted that hospitality here. If I’m Smith and Anne Hidalgo is Jay-Z, the fish sandwich is as follows: I had a great temporary office. I had a locker that permitted me to leave my laptop in the building. I drank approximately 60 espressos from the high-end machines (no K-Cups at these “Greenest-Ever Olympics”). I ate my body weight in the free madeleines that appeared every afternoon. I also ate free ice cream on two occasions, and had a beer at a cocktail event with journalists and city officials last week. I got a free tote bag with a Paris Media Center water bottle. Among the perks that I did not partake in: Morning yoga, afternoon massages, the clubbing in Paris tour, and the fact that this place has been open and staffed 24 hours a day for weeks now.
Beats working at a cafe. I mention it not because I think the media is complicit in manufacturing consent about the water quality in the Seine, though there is plenty of access journalism in sports and politics and pampering journalists is usually, though not always, a way to make them say nice things. But rather because it provided the, shall we say, temporary scaffolding on which this Olympic diary could play out.
So, without further ado, I present the fruits of this blogging harvest. There’s something for everyone in here: 19th-century sewer tourism, a rugby player in his underwear, geothermal cooling, big tech doing social engineering, politics and patriotism, the legacy of the Commune, massive police mobilization, the beauty of temporary structures. If you’re looking for my most cynical take on the Games, you’ll want to read my 48 questions on Day 16. If you’re looking for the most joy, you’ll want to read about the bicycle race on Day 9.
I say it’s perishable, and I do think after today we will all have had quite enough of Olympics stuff. I never want to hear that Olympic anthem again. But I also believe these articles form a coherent body of work (all on this page) that tells a larger story about planning, development, spectacle, and sports, and I hope people will read them for some time to come.
Finally, I saw Imane Khelif win her gold medal on Friday before an ecstatic home crowd chanting her name. It was pretty great. But after 17,000 words in 17 days, you don’t want to read me try to do a Norman Mailer impression. I can barely spell.
As ever, thanks for reading. More on leaded gasoline next month.
Day 1: Scaffolding and the virtue of experiment
Day 2: Opening ceremony, very wet, one week of police state partially redeemed
Day 3: Feeding Paris, a trip to the wholesale market at Rungis
Day 4: In the métro, at the forefront of transit planning and digital navigation
Day 5: Heat wave! Was building the Olympic Village without air conditioning a good idea?
Day 6: Swimming in the Seine. I watched them dive in.
Day 7: Vibe shift. Surprise: The Olympics are kind of fun?
Day 8: Olympics as economic development—looking into the equity angle on these Games
Day 9: The bicycle race
Day 10: Olympic patriotism
Day 11: The “greenest-ever games.” A noble effort, but did it work?
Day 12: In the bike lane. The city’s bicycle revolution carries right over into Olympic week.
Day 13: The “Olympic Effect” for small businesses. It’s not good.
Day 14: LA 2028. This is a tough act to follow.
Day 15: An accessible Paris, in which France spends $10 billion dollars on the Olympics and it’s still impossible to ride the subway in a wheelchair
Day 16: 48 questions about the Olympics
Day 17: The end. They pulled it off! But was that what we were supposed to be worried about?
Great reporting and writing, Henry.