The first Olympic Games held in Paris, in 1900, were an afterthought—a supplement to the Exposition Universelle, the giant World’s Fair. The inaugural modern Olympics had taken place in Athens, four years earlier, and the founder of the modern Games, a Frenchman named Pierre de Coubertin, imagined that the second iteration could be part of an exhibit at the fair designed to evoke the original Olympics, in ancient Greece. There, among the grand displays of Art Noveau and contemporary innovations—dry-cell batteries, the moving sidewalk—he proposed that one would find replicas of stadiums, temples, and gymnasiums, not to mention the athletes, living monuments to classical ideals of physical and spiritual excellence.
But after the Exposition Universelle agreed to include the event, Coubertin lost control of it. There were no opening or closing ceremonies; events were held between May and October, and included hot-air ballooning, tug-of-war, and firefighting competitions. Some of the contenders weren’t aware that they were taking part in the Olympics, which were called Competitions of Physical Exercises and Sports by the exhibition’s organizers and more commonly the “championships” by the press. What the athletes did know is that the competitions were disorganized, even a disaster. One dismayed Australian competitor called them a “huge joke.”
Somebody, surely, was having a laugh. The ice-skating competition was part of a cutlery exhibit, along with forks and knives. An American took the lead in the marathon, and claimed he was never passed, but the event was somehow won by a local baker “who was thoroughly familiar with the course and its shortcuts,” as Reet Ann Howell and Max L. Howell write in the “Historical Dictionary of the Modern Olympic Movement.” The track-and-field events were held in the Bois de Boulogne, the park in which the posh Racing Club of France was situated. The R.C.F. did not want the grounds altered; discuses and javelins flew into the trees, and fallen telephone poles were used to make the hurdles. The swimming events were held in the polluted Seine. Perhaps the best thing one could say about the 1900 Paris Olympics was that the 1904 Games, at a World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, were much worse. But that’s another story.
However disappointed Coubertin was in those Olympics—he described them as “a humiliated vassal”—he probably would have hated the latest Paris Olympics, which begin on Friday, even more. He would have been appalled, for one thing, by the presence of more than five and a half thousand female athletes, nearly half of the total number of competitors. Women took part in the 1900 Paris Games, but only in events in which they were not expected to sweat, and Coubertin disliked even that. “I do not approve of women in public competitions,” he said. “In the Olympic Games, their primary role should be to crown the victors.”
Coubertin, an aristocrat, had been inspired by the excavations of ancient Olympic sites across Greece, and believed in the heroic elements of sport—the pursuit of human perfection through physical exercise and competition. The Greeks called their games agones, or struggles. It is where we get the word “agony.” And they believed that winning could impart a kind of immortality. Coubertin imagined the Olympics as a pseudo-religious project, complete with “church, dogma, ritual.” He believed that competition, in conditions of fair play, incurs a kind of honor. And he believed, or at least claimed to believe, that nationalism on the field of play could substitute for nationalism on the battlefield.
He also despised commercialism. The Olympics were established during a conference to protect amateurism, an effort that was connected to anxieties about class. Coubertin may have been less concerned with the amateur status of athletes than some of the aristocrats he recruited into the Olympic movement, but he believed that the idealism of the Games was in contradiction to the pursuit of financial gain. Today, money sluices through the Olympics—although only a small fraction of it is flowing to the athletes, with most of it going to corporate executives, not to mention the directors of the International Olympic Committee. This year’s Games reportedly cost nearly ten billion dollars. (In contrast to many previous Games that ultimately lost money, the Paris Olympics are expected to turn a small profit.) NBC is paying almost eight billion dollars for the right to broadcast the Games in the United States through 2032. Coca-Cola is paying around three billion dollars for a twelve-year sponsorship deal. And so on. Coubertin would have despised all of this. Sport must decide whether it would be a “market or a temple,” he once declared. And it’s not hard to imagine how he would have felt about the doping scandals that continuously hang over the Games.
These days, there are no grand illusions about how the Olympics can transform mankind. They are not, as Coubertin promised, the conduit to world peace. They are rife with hypocrisy and, historically, corruption. They are also, increasingly, the triumphs of authoritarian regimes, the ones who can most easily afford to force such expensive spectacles on their people. It is well documented that Olympic host cities divert resources—and, in some cases, even raze the homes—of those who need them most, in favor of equestrian events or to see who can jump over the highest bar. Even in host nations that promise “sustainability” and respect for the needs of local populations, harm is hard to avoid. When the Paris organizers announced that the surfing events would take place in Tahiti, for instance, locals in the small community of Teahupo‘o protested the move, fearing what the influx of visitors and the building of infrastructure would do to their way of life. Among the causes of concerns was a three-story aluminum judging tower that would be erected by drilling into a reef. In December, a barge that was being used in its construction ran aground and damaged the fragile coral.
All that aside, it is astonishing how much of Coubertin’s original vision persists. There are other big athletic events: the World Cup, the Super Bowl. But the Olympics, for all of their many serious flaws, promote idealism in a way that those other competitions do not. The athletes still believe in those classical virtues of excellence, in the agony and ecstasy, and so do so many of us who watch them. The World’s Fairs have more or less disappeared from popular consciousness; the Olympics, in some sense, have replaced them, not only in their demonstrations of human achievement but in their projection of a more hopeful future.
Which brings me to the Seine. When the Olympics returned to Paris, in 1924, the swimming took place not in the Seine but in a pool, the Piscine des Tourelles. Swimming in the Seine was banned altogether one year prior. It was, after all, not merely a river but a road through Paris, crowded with barges. It was also a sewer, filled with refuse from houseboats and the untreated sewage that overflowed the city’s nineteenth-century system when it rained. Various attempts to clean up the Seine failed. When Paris was selected to host the 2024 Games, seven years ago, it was still illegal to swim in the river.
But the organizers nonetheless decided that they would host the marathon swim and the swimming portion of the triathlon in the Seine. To make it swimmable, the French government spent one and a half billion dollars in river improvement, building a water-treatment plant in Champigny-sur-Marne and a massive holding tank for untreated overflow water under a public garden near the Austerlitz train station, and establishing regulations that required houseboats to hook into the municipal sewer system. This hasn’t worked perfectly. After a particularly wet May, the office of Paris’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, has acknowledged that, in June, levels of E. coli bacteria were ten times the allowable amount; a promise by the Mayor to jump into the water to prove its safety was pushed back. Organizers, who had insisted that there was no backup plan for the Olympic events, finally allowed that there were contingencies in place if contamination levels remained high, including possibly cancelling the swimming portion of the triathlon.
Drier weather since then has improved the water quality, and Hidalgo finally took the plunge last week—she declared the water wonderful, if a bit cold. (The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, has also promised to swim in the Seine, but not before the Olympics.) The idea of swimming in the Seine remains a huge joke to many people, but not to the Olympic swimmers. Some teams aren’t taking any chances; British athletes are being vaccinated for typhoid and hepatitis A, and will be put on antibiotics after the race. Hidalgo, meanwhile, has announced plans to construct three swimming pools in the river, which are supposed to open to the public next summer. Some Parisians have wondered who will actually make use of them, and whether there might have been a better use of a billion and a half dollars. In June, a protest-promoting hashtag, #JeChieDansLaSeineLe23Juin—“I shit in the Seine on June 23”—went viral. A Web site for the protest offered this rationale: “After putting us in shit it’s up to them to bathe in our shit.” The site also included a calculator for shitters to measure their distance from central Paris so that they could time their shits just right.
And yet. Paris is getting hotter; few Parisians have access to air-conditioning. They need a place to cool off. There used to be a handful of types of fish in the Seine; now there are more than twenty. “We want to make the reconnection of inhabitants with the river, reconnect the people with the water,” Pierre Rabadan, a deputy mayor of Paris, told Yahoo Sports recently. “With increasing degrees and temperatures, we need to re-create a refreshing point in the River Seine.” The Olympics, he added, are “playing a massive role in that target.” A sewage-holding basin is not as fancy as a moving walkway, as flashy as a Ferris wheel, or as fascinating as all the wonders of the old exhibitions, and a stretch of rain still might land a swimmer in the squats. But there’s something to be said for this struggle, much like there’s something to be said for the agony of athletes. There is hope in it. ♦