Paris 2024: Heavy Eiffel Tower Medals
As Seine booksellers get a stay of execution, Paris braces for an invasion of French people during the Games.
As a recent email reminded me, we are only 2 months away from being 100 days away from the Paris 2024 Olympics, marking a non-milestone that proves anything around the Games can be turned into a marketing opportunity.
Indeed, there is no escaping the hype machine, which is being turned up to 11. Earlier this month, there was the unveiling of the Olympic medals with great fanfare. The medals were designed by House of Chaumet, a jeweler owned by luxury gargantuan LVMH which is the Games’ Sugar Daddy.
One side of the medals is adorned with a scrap of iron from the Eiffel Tower, cut into a hexagon shape (mainland France is referred to as the Hexagon because it kinda sorta has borders on 6 sides). The iron was collected over the years during various renovations. Thank goodness for pack rats!
Dig it:
Speaking of French icons, those scrappy booksellers that line the Seine won’t be sent to the guillotine after all. (Please note that sentence actually includes 3 French icons!) President Macron declared that they can keep their heads — and their ramshackle book stalls during the games. The Paris police had planned to remove hundreds of them, arguing that they represented a security risk. The fate of the bouquinistes had attracted worldwide attention and the obligatory online petition. A Macron spokesperson called them the “living patrimoine of the capital.” And so, after years of planning, the coppers will have to draw up a new security plan.
Meanwhile, Parisians seemed surprised to learn that having the Olympics in their city might pose certain inconveniences. Like large chunks of Paris are being closed to cars. Perhaps even more alarming, city dwellers are starting to come to terms with some of the competitions that have been declared Olympic sports, which include “3x3 basketball competitions…as well as skateboarding and breakdancing.”
On the tourism front, the Games are also looking like they will be a bit of a mixed bag. In 2023, France experienced another rise in tourism that put the number of visitors back to pre-pandemic levels. Yeah! Looking ahead, however, economic development officials are trying to tamp down expectations for international tourism during the Games.
Officials are projecting 15 million tourists in Paris during the Games, according to Le Parisien. However, the vast majority of these tourists are expected to be…French.
“One takeaway is that foreign clients will be less plentiful, we will have many French nationals, notably people from the Paris region,” explained Tourism director Corinne Menegaux. The breakdown is expected to be 13.4 million Frenchies, and 1.9 million non-Frenchies. Among the more shocking effects, Menegaux said: “We’re going to hear more French spoken in the streets of Paris this summer than a normal summer.”
Security continues to be the source of much planning. As plans came into focus, French police realized that they were going to have to pay the steepest of all prices: A ban on all vacation time in August. So, in the grandest of French traditions, they successfully went on strike for more pay and better support for things like housing and childcare during the games.
Otherwise, preparations seem to be proceeding with unusual calm. (Jinx!) The construction work for various Olympic sites is more or less on schedule. That includes the Olympic Village.
Finally, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, as part of her New Year’s speech, promised that she would swim in the Seine this summer. She invited other city council members to join her. You’ll recall that France is spending a bazillion euros to clean up the Seine, a heavily polluted river thanks to the wide swath of industrial sites that line it outside of Paris and all that dog poop that Parisians don’t pick up off the sidewalk and then gets washed into the river during heavy rains.
The plan is to hold the Olympic opening ceremony on the Seine along with events like the triathlon. “We will bathe in the Seine,” Hidalgo declared.
Chris O’Brien
Le Pecq