PRESS RELEASE
By Saccage 2024
April 28 2022
Saccage 2024 is a collective of residents, collectives and associations in Seine-Saint-Denis and nearby who defend their living spaces threatened by preparations for the Paris Olympic Games. For a year and a half, we have been investigating the different harms caused by the Games, spreading this information on our networks and in the street, and supporting local struggles to prevent Olympics construction.
We are not the only ones to fight against this Olympic mega machine, which ravages the lands we cultivate and the neighborhoods we live in, which endangers the health of the workers and the inhabitants, which imposes new security laws, which denigrates the populations (of working class neighborhoods in particular) by denying their democratic rights, and which promotes a competitive, nationalistic and profit-obsessed sports.
Saccage 2024 is organizing a weekend of international anti-Olympic meetings on May 21 and 22 in Seine-Saint-Denis, a northern suburb of the French capital. Those who have lived through the “Olympic ransacking” of the past (Sochi, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo), those who are organizing against the coming Games (Los Angeles, Sapporo, Catalonia), and those who have succeeded in having their city’s candidacy rejected (Hamburg) will be present to exchange experiences of the damages caused by the Olympics in our respective regions and to organize a fight against Olympism on an international scale.
On May 21, we will meet at the University of Paris 8 (Saint-Denis) for a day of discussions, debates
and organization open to all. The program :
- 10:30-12:00 : Ecological destruction and Olympic Greenwashing: Can we stop the next edition of “the Greenest Games ever”?
- 13:30-14:30 : Saccage 2012-2028: A look back at the lived experiences, and destructions generated by the previous and future editions
- 15:00-16:30 : Olympic Policing: how the Games could be used to set up or test the control of populations
- 17:00-18:30 : Anti-Olympic struggles: what can we learn from previous experiences of struggle?
The next day, May 22, we will visit the Olympic sites in the Parc Georges Valbon (Courneuve). We start our tour at 11am, at the Aire des Vents where the media village is under construction. We will arrive at the Boulodrome, threatened to host the shooting competition, around 12:30 pm and will have a picnic there: this will be an opportunity for further exchange with the international delegations in a relaxed setting. The afternoon will be followed by Counter-Olympic Games where we will show that “another sport is possible”, by practicing our sports in an inclusive, non-commercialized and noncompetitive way.
Our international guests will include:
- Jules Boykoff (Pacific University), author of Power Games (2016, Verso) and NOlympians (Fernwood Publishing, 2020), and a renowned expert on the Olympics in the English-speaking world;
- Sven Daniel Wolfe (University of Lausanne), co-author of ‘An evaluation of the sustainability of the Olympic Games’ the study published by Nature in 2020;
- Satoko Itani (Kansai University, Japan), author of Taiikukai-kei joshi no politics (Politics of Sporting Female Masculinity in Japan: Body, Gender, and Sexuality) (Kansai University Press, 2021, not translated in English)
- And NOlympics LA, NOlympia Hamburg, Han Gorin No Kai (Tokyo), STOP JJOO (Pyrenees – Barcelona) and others.
We are not the first to try to resist the ransacking of the Olympic Games, but we hope to be the last ones to have to do so! We hope that this weekend will mark an important step for the ongoing struggles of the various collectives and for the future of anti-Olympism at the international level.
Information will be updated on our website: https://saccage2024.noblogs.org/
And on our social media accounts: @saccage2024 (Twitter: @2024saccage)
If you have any questions about this weekend, you can send an email to : [email protected] (French or English)
