The Alexander III Bridge in Paris. Even if political problems flare again in France in the coming weeks, a core pride at a remarkable accomplishment will linger. Photo / Dmitry Kostyukov, The New York Times
All sectors of society came together to achieve the nation’s dream for the Games. Success has shown that unity is possible, if often elusive.
Even the jumps at the Olympic equestrian events were meticulously crafted works of art. In the gardens of the Château de Versailles, riders negotiated fences modelled on the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, Paris bistros, streets with a horse in their name such as Passage du Cheval Blanc and a stained-glass window from Notre Dame.
France, aiming high for the Paris Olympics (perilously high, many thought), was not about to stick mere poles in the ground and ask horses and their riders to jump those obstacles in the former residence of kings.
Uncompromising French ambition has marked the remarkable 16 days of the Olympics, a miracle of detailed planning and execution at a cost of about US$4.8 billion ($7.9b). France came into the Games shaken by two rounds of an unexpected legislative election that yielded a political impasse. It will exit with those problems unsolved but with a new self-confidence.
“Today, no responsible politician can say that the French are durably and definitively divided and that there are not possible levers to bring them together,” Gabriel Attal, the departing Prime Minister, said in an interview.
That appears to be an important change.
Even if political problems flare again in the coming weeks, as they almost certainly will, a core pride at a remarkable accomplishment, impossible without the contribution of all sectors of society, appears likely to endure for a long time.
It is as if the renowned schools of France that produce world-class engineers and world-class analytical thinkers found a way to fuse with the creators of French artistic beauty, turning Paris into a sumptuous, efficient stadium and its sometimes-surly inhabitants into some of the kindest people on Earth.
Things worked; the party grew; people relaxed. The dismissive French “Bof” and shrug gave way to a universal smile. Paris became a city of cheers and murmurs. Inclusiveness – of French people of every origin, skin colour and creed – was a core theme from the opening ceremony onward in a society torn by tense debate over immigration. The embrace extended to visitors from all over the world.
Even the volunteers raking the Olympic beach volleyball court beneath the Eiffel Tower smoothed the sand with a spring in their steps. Nail polish in blue, white and red – the colours of France – was everywhere. France piled up medals – 64, including 16 gold – and found in swimmer Léon Marchand its hero of the hour, with four gold medal swims.
ABBA’s Dancing Queen became the national anthem of Sweden as Armand Duplantis soared over 6.25m to set a world record and win the gold medal in the pole vault Monday. The roar that went up would have taken the roof off the Stade de France if it had one.
The hundreds of “motivators” employed to get crowds going with Gala’s Freed from Desire or the Mexican wave were frenzied energisers. They seemed intent on releasing everyone’s inner child. They were also deft. When tensions flared between the Brazilian and Canadian teams in the beach volleyball final, leading to a sharp altercation at the net, the DJ dissolved the fracas by playing John Lennon’s Imagine. The crowd sang. The players smiled.
At other volleyball matches, on sand or not, the motivators had thousands of people intoning “Monster block! Monster, monster, monster block!!” as spectators raised and lowered their arms to salute the blocking of a spike.
Speaking of things blocked, France still is. Its newly elected Parliament is so divided that it is hard to see how a governing coalition could be formed.
“We don’t really have the culture of coalitions,” Attal said, alluding to the top-down presidential system that has dominated the Fifth Republic.
The Olympics have been a vacation from that deadlock, but the idyll will not be lasting, and fundamental questions – such as who will run the government – will move front and centre soon after the Games end. President Emmanuel Macron, for whom the glow of the Olympics may ease the widespread hostility toward him, will have to name a new prime minister in the coming weeks, even if the August holidays give him a little leeway.
Precedents are not encouraging when it comes to the lingering effect of sporting triumph. The French victory in the World Cup soccer tournament in 2018, a feel-good moment for the nation, was followed within months by the yellow vest protest movement that brought France to a near standstill.
The famous “black, blanc, beur” (“black, white, Arab”) French soccer team that won the World Cup in 1998 and became the multihued darling of the nation did not influence France for long enough to prevent Jean-Marie Le Pen, the bigoted leader of the anti-immigrant National Front, from reaching the runoff of the presidential election in 2002.
Still, for now, France is basking in the admiration of the world.
Tony Estanguet, head of the Paris Olympics Committee, told France Inter radio Thursday, “These games are still more beautiful in reality than in my craziest dreams. It was worth clinging to this ambitious vision, and it feels good to see the surge of fraternity.”
Left and right, bitterly divided, found a shared patriotism in the success of the Olympics, which had been widely criticised in the prelude as too expensive, too disruptive and simply too ambitious for France to pull off.
“There was an orchestrated drive to detest Paris,” Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor and a driving force behind the Games, told the newspaper Le Monde. “Because Paris is the city of all the liberties.”
Blaming the reactionary right for the destructiveness and negativity in France before the Games, she added: “We should not try to prolong the Olympic moment, we won’t succeed. But we must try to understand and deconstruct what was at work before – that is to say the desire to cast all of humanity into wars of one side against the other.”
At the Parc de la Villette, in northeastern Paris, several countries, including France, opened pavilions to celebrate the Games and their national cultures. Crowds in high spirits thronged there day after day.
The India House, with its authentic food, was one major attraction. There I found Esther Benata, 66, a retired actress, and Hélène Castelle, 66, who manufactured leather purses with her husband before retiring.
“We are completely transported!” Benata said.
“This changes us, and it’s one big party!” Castelle said. “The Parisians who left town will regret it to the end of their days.”
“The key was all the people, not just French people, mixed together like here, the blending,” Benata said.
“In September, the usual mess will start over,” Castelle said. “That’s certain. But that can’t change the fact we had a great time!”
There have been quibbles – the food at the Olympic Village and the water in the cleaned-up Seine where swimming events were held, for example. There was intense discussion of the colour of the track at the Stade de France – was it purple, or pale purple, or pastel purple, or maybe violet, or even periwinkle blue? The jury is still out, but no athletes seem to have complained at this luminous French choice.
France, in the end, proved something to itself and offered something positive to a tense and treacherous world. No Russian athlete competed under the Russian flag. It was Russia’s loss.
“It’s not all over,” Hidalgo said in her interview with Le Monde, suggesting that pessimism had been overdone.
The Paris Olympics are almost over. But an end is also a beginning. The last jump at the equestrian events was “LA 28.” At the closing ceremony Sunday evening at the Stade de France, Hidalgo will hand the Olympic flag to Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Roger Cohen
Photographs by: Dmitry Kostyukov, Gabriela Bhaskar, James Hill, Chang W. Lee and Daniel Berehulak
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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