This summer, beginning July 26, Paris is set to host its third Olympic games. As residents of Olympic host cities, past and future, we extend our solidarity to the residents of Paris bearing the brunt of the event’s negative impacts, particularly working-class and poor, racialized, immigrant, and unhoused Parisians.
From host city to host city, we have seen communities swept and displaced, and vulnerable populations surveilled and imprisoned in the name of “beautifying” the city. Paris has been no exception: as the Olympics approach police have intensified sweeps of migrants’ encampments, with some residents bussed to other regions of France — displaced from the networks and services they rely on. These police actions remind us of the evictions from Meiji Park and Miyashita Park in Tokyo, the displacement of encampments in Inglewood in the lead-up to the 2022 Super Bowl in Los Angeles, and the sweeps of folks living on the street in Rio, London, Vancouver, Atlanta, Sydney, and so on. Long-time, working-class residents of Saint-Denis and Saint-Ouen also face rising displacement pressures as the giant Paris 2024 Athletes’ Village complex attracts further real estate speculation to these neighborhoods.
While Olympic impacts always fall disproportionately on certain communities, all Parisians lost out as beloved green space was gobbled up in the Olympic land grab, from the community garden plots destroyed in Aubervilliers to the l’Aire des Vents park, part of which was concretized to build the Olympics media village. All French people lost out when French politicians used the upcoming Olympics as an excuse to trample existing privacy protections and expand the use of Artificial Intelligence technologies in policing and surveillance operations for the first time in the European Union. And all Parisians will lose out when the city erects unprecedented security barriers around a large chunk of the Seine River and its adjacent neighborhoods in order to ‘secure’ the Opening Ceremonies extravaganza, greatly infringing on residents’ right to access and move freely through their own city.
Courtesy of France’s ongoing imperialism, in Teahupo’o, Tahiti, Olympic organizers forced the construction of a new observation tower to facilitate Olympic surfing, against local residents’ wishes and at great risk to the area’s reef ecology.
The Olympics are a tool used by powerful political and business leaders to trample on our rights and lives in the name of a party for the rich.
This extremely expensive party also drives a nationalist fervor that further divides us, contrary to the International Olympics Committee’s stated mission. These upcoming Olympics will likely be used to sportswash Israel’s image as it continues its genocidal violence against Palestinian people, territory, and culture, enabled and funded by several of our countries’ governments. Our struggles against dispossession, imperialism, capitalism, and police states are all connected.
Finally, the Olympics motto, ‘faster, higher, stronger,’ devalues people who may be slower, ‘lower,’ and weaker. It expresses and reproduces the ableist, racist, sexist, and elitist ideologies of Olympics founder Pierre de Coubertin.
We stand together with Saccage 2024 and all others standing up against the Olympic machine in Paris, Saint-Denis, Marseille, Tahiti, and elsewhere. Your struggle is our struggle. And we will continue to build and strengthen our transnational movement against the Olympics.
We say NO to displacement, gentrification, policing, environmental destruction, and worker exploitation, in Paris and around the world. NO Olympics Anywhere. Abolish the Olympics!
Join our actions in the days leading up to July 26 in Paris, Tokyo, Seoul, and LA, or organize your own solidarity event in another city. And join us in demanding #NOlympicsAnywhere.
NOlympics LA
Hangorin no kai No Olympics 2020 (Tokyo)
Anti Pyeongchang Olympics Alliance
Wasatch Tenants United (Salt Lake City)
The Citizens Committee on the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Sapporo
Network of People Who Don’t Want the Olympics (Nagano)
No 2020 Olympics Disaster OkotowaLink (Tokyo)
Sapporo Olympics Policy Office
Unsustainable Olympics Committee (Milan)
NO JO (French Alps)
Counter Olympics London