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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
With some rare exceptions, such as those who tried to sabotage French high-speed rail services last week, few would wish failure on the 33rd Olympiad. The organisers of the Paris Olympics, like their predecessors, aim to host a crowd-pleasing athletic spectacle and run a secure, globally unifying event, even at a time of French national disunity.
But success for these Games has an added dimension: addressing climate challenges. Attention this week has focused on early medals, but also on the state of the Seine, whose water quality fell sharply after heavy rain, forcing postponement of the men’s triathlon. Amid rising global temperatures and in the city where the 2015 climate agreement was forged, the organisers have set a goal of emitting less greenhouse gas, serving more plant-based food, using less single-use plastic and deploying more temporary venues. Faster, higher, stronger, yes, but also leaner, greener — and hotter.
Tension between environmental and Olympic objectives is not new, as Madeleine Orr explains in Warming Up, her new book about how climate change is changing sport. The committee behind the 1932 Lake Placid Winter Games had to backtrack on a plan to fell 2,500 trees in the Adirondack Forest Preserve to create a bobsleigh run after protests and lawsuits.
The goal of leaving a lasting legacy has also been part of Olympic planning for years. As the aftermath of Athens in 2004 and Rio de Janeiro in 2016 showed, efforts to avoid building Olympic white elephants are not always successful. But London 2012 provided a good example of regeneration and the repurposing of venues, and Los Angeles’ Memorial Coliseum, already used for the 1932 and 1984 Games, will have a third outing in 2028.
Environmentalists are rightly wary of “greenwashing”. A report by climate-focused non-profit groups Carbon Market Watch and Éclaircies described efforts to green the Games as “a decent attempt”. But it called for tighter monitoring of progress, greater transparency, more responsible sponsorship and even a downscaling of the whole concept to reduce the amount of carbon burnt by incoming spectators.
High-sounding pre-Olympic promises can backfire, none more spectacularly than those of Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau. He boasted that the 1976 Olympics could “no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby”. It took 30 years for the Canadian city to pay off its debt, earning the Olympics a reputation for filling spectators’ hearts but emptying the public purse.
Still, the Paris organisers deserve credit for aiming as high as the athletes. They want to halve the greenhouse gas emissions of the Games that took place in London and Rio. (Tokyo was an outlier, delayed by a year because of the pandemic, and run largely behind closed doors in 2021.) They have also planned for 95 per cent of the venues to be temporary or to use existing assets, built and natural — water pollution permitting.
The change in approaches to building event infrastructure is highlighted at one of only two new permanent sites, the Olympic aquatics centre. It sits opposite the Stade de France, where much of the track and field competition will take place. The former is a solar-powered building furnished with recycled materials; the latter is a massive concrete legacy of the 1998 football World Cup.
It is an existential imperative for the Olympics to do better. Climate change is already having an impact, whether from the heat that now threatens most summer Games, or the dwindling snow cover that jeopardises winter Olympics. Demonstrable efficiency is also key to attracting potential hosts put off by the risk of Montreal-style cost overruns.
From Dick Fosbury’s 1968 “flop”-style high jump, to the more recent aerodynamic skinsuits of the Team GB cycling team, innovations have enlivened and improved Olympic competition. An inventive, cost-effective and sustainable approach to staging the Games is equally vital to their future.
