The one-year countdown for the opening of the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics has begun. The return of the Olympics to France has largely been met with eager anticipation for this international sporting extravaganza, but is equally tempered by the usual security concerns, political controversies, and yes, the legendary Parisian traffic.
When the Games open on July 26 next year, it shall mark the centenary of the Olympics held in Paris in 1924. A century ago, only 44 nations participated in the Paris games; today there are expected to be nearly 200 participant countries, according to the International Olympic Committee.
Equally, the Paris Olympics are following in the wake of the cancelled Tokyo Olympics scheduled for 2020, but suspended by the global Covid-19 pandemic, and then fitfully restarted a year later with little enthusiasm and limited spectators.
Now the French capital holds the grand stage to host the largest Olympics in modern times with thousands of athletes, millions of fans not to mention the global media extravaganza.
The French really know how to present a spectacle of light, sound and animation. One has only to look at the glittering light shows on the Eiffel Tower nightly to see that is but a taste of what is to come for the ceremonies.
The Olympic opening ceremony will take place not in a stadium but rather along the River Seine, which winds through Paris, passing spectacular monuments and bridges. The ceremony highlights the parade of athletes held on the Seine, with boats for each national team. This Neo-Pharaonic spectacle shall sail through the city centre for 6.7 kilometres, while 10,500 athletes will be viewed along the way by over 600,000 spectators.
Among 28 Olympic sports, four new ones have been added to the roster, including skateboarding and surfing. But there's no surfing the waves on the River Seine in Paris, so that shall take place in faraway French Tahiti. Sporting venues inside and around Paris are set among the monuments and grandeur of the City of Light as a backdrop.
Naturally, such grandiose plans in an area as historic and urban as the French capital are going to get some pushback. The roads and esplanades along the river are shared in many places by the venerable bookseller stalls, which have their outdoor shops literally along the river. More than 200 bouquinistes, who comprise the largest open-air book market in Europe, are pushing back to municipal plans to move the bookstalls, which are fastened to walls along the banks of the Seine.
Jerome Callais, head of the Paris Booksellers' Cultural Association, which represents 88% of bouquinistes, said they had "no intention of moving", according to the news site France24. The riverside second-hand book and poster stall tradition goes back hundreds of years.
Naturally, the unspoken word concerning any Olympiad, especially in a city such as Paris, remains the risk of terrorism or extremist demonstrations. Paris sadly has seen both, with major Islamic jihadi attacks as recently as November 2015 and serious and sometimes violent demonstrations over the past year. This remains a sober reality for any Olympic venue, especially one such as Paris, which must balance its image and access with serious security.
While security shall be exceptional and warranted, there's a new concern over widespread camera technology, which is linked to yet unspecified artificial intelligence-gathering capacity.
"We are not China; we do not want to be Big Brother," says one Paris-based AI entrepreneur bidding for an Olympics video surveillance contract. French law explicitly rules out using facial recognition technology, as China uses, to monitor suspicious individuals, but rights advocates fear government overreach.
Though the cost of the upcoming Paris Games is slated at about US$8 billion (277 billion baht), that's lower than London 2012 and is shared between governmental and private sources. Sadly, corruption concerning contracts has also shadowed the games. Moreover, Olympiads throughout recent history have been plagued by cost overruns, leaving a financial legacy of debt, sometimes decades after the events.
Naturally, there are controversies over some participants. Given Russian President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine, will Russia's team be permitted to participate? How will China bully or coerce any team from Taiwan? The International Olympic Committee hasn't decided if athletes from Russia may compete in Paris.
Ireland was given formal recognition as an independent state for the Paris Olympics in 1924, and it was at these Games that Ireland made its first appearance in the Games as an independent nation. Now the clock is ticking for Paris 2024.
John J Metzler is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defence issues.