See our full “How to Report on the Olympics: From Paris 2024 to LA 2028” guide here!
What you need to know to report on the Paris 2024 Olympics responsibly
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Both Paris 2024 and LA 2028 have been framed by the IOC and other Olympics boosters as events that will rescue the struggling Olympic industry — events that will allegedly rely primarily on existing infrastructure and offer financially and socially responsible models for future Olympics. But the Paris 2024 Olympics show us that a) this is not true, and b) even if it were true, a multitude of other problems still exist.
Paris 2024 is costing the public a LOT of money.
- Organizers like to claim 96% of the budget is privately funded, but they’re only talking about the organizing committee’s budget of around 4.4 billion euros. Another 4.5 billion euros have been spent on construction projects like the athletes village and a new aquatics center. (As of July 2024, this near 9-billion-euro budget was equivalent to about $10 billion.)
Paris is building a lot for these Olympics, fueling displacement and gentrification.
- The athletes village, the media village, the aquatics center, a gymnastics and badminton arena. These are all new constructions for Paris.
- The athletes village directly displaced a workers’ hostel, home to mostly immigrant laborers, as well as “three schools, two apartment blocks, a hotel and 19 businesses employing some 1,000 people.” As the village will be converted into housing after the Olympics (with only a small portion allocated for ‘affordable’ housing), it threatens to increase displacement and gentrification pressures in its surrounding neighborhoods, which are home to many low-income, immigrant residents.
- An Olympic-standard practice pool was built adjacent to the Aubervilliers workers’ gardens, justifying the destruction and displacement of several workers’ vegetable and flower plots.
- The media village was constructed in the l’Aire des Vents park, steamrolling over various European environmental protections.
Paris has ramped up its criminalization of poverty.
- Like so many other Olympic host cities, Paris is banishing unhoused people from key tourist areas at higher rates than in recent years, as this in-depth report from Le Revers de la Medaille demonstrates. As the New York Times has reported, many people are being bused outside the city, to shelters or other regions of the country with limited opportunities and resources. Unhoused residents and advocates have denounced the process as social cleansing.
- The city is also cracking down on and evicting housing squats, destabilizing residents’ lives, community networks, and access to resources and jobs.
Paris 2024 has been used to justify the unprecedented use of AI surveillance technologies.
- The French government approved an array of “AI-powered surveillance cameras” for use ahead of, during, and for a period after the Olympics. In a letter denouncing the plan, 40 European lawmakers argued it “would set a surveillance precedent of the kind never before seen in Europe, using the pretext of the [2024 Paris Summer] Olympic games.” And as Amnesty International wrote, “such draconian technologies of mass surveillance violate the rights to privacy and can lead to violations of the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.” Although the government has so far only approved this exceptional surveillance expansion for a temporary period, past Olympic host cities have a track record of introducing ‘temporary’ policing technologies that become permanent.
- Additionally, Paris is erecting unprecedented security barriers around a large chunk of the Seine River and its adjacent neighborhoods in order to ‘secure’ the Opening Ceremonies extravaganza. It will require residents and tourists alike to register in advance and show a QR code to enter certain areas, a massive expansion of state surveillance capacity that infringes on people’s right to access and move freely through the city.
The claims that Paris 2024 is the ‘most green Olympics ever’ are bogus.
- “Just three of its sponsorship deals will produce more pollution than eight coal plants running for an entire year,” The Ecologist reports.
- It is impossible for an event on the scale of the Olympics to be “green” or “sustainable” in a time of climate crisis.