The stage is set for the 2024 Summer Olympic Games, branded as ‘Paris 2024’, which will take place from this Friday, 26 July to 11 August. For the first time ever, in the opening ceremony – a spectacular ‘Parade of Nations’ – the world’s athletes will parade not in a stadium, but on boats floating down the Seine River.

Although the opening ceremony takes place on Friday, the first events start today, Wednesday, when Argentina play Morocco and Uzbekistan face Spain in men’s football. Rugby sevens, archery, and handball will also start before the opening ceremony, and the first medals will be awarded on Saturday. The Games will end with the women’s basketball gold-medal game slated to be the final event.

For the next 19 days, Paris will be in front of the international lens as more than 10,000 athletes from 206 participating National Olympic Committee and seemingly countless fans converge on France to witness and revel in the first Summer Games held in front of crowds in eight years.

Five athletes representing Malta, selected by the Maltese Olympic Committee (MOC), will participate. They are sprinter Beppe Grillo, judoka Katryna Esposito, shooter Gianluca Chetcuti, and swimmers Sasha Gatt and Kyle Micallef.

The importance of the Olympic Games for France can vary depending on different factors such as national pride, sporting achievements, and economic impact. Generally, the Olympics offer the host nation the opportunity to showcase its athletic talent globally, bolstering its reputation as a sporting nation.

Additionally, hosting the Olympic Games can provide significant economic benefits through tourism, infrastructure development, and international exposure. Therefore, for France at this time, the Olympic Games are crucial for both sporting success and economic gains.

The French are keeping their fingers crossed that all will go smoothly. Amid concerns about protests, strikes, security and whatever might be floating in the Seine, the City of Light is about to strike a pose on its years-long Olympics runway.

Paris is the central host city, with events held at 16 other cities across the Metropolitan region, including the neighbouring cities of Saint-Denis, Le Bourget, Nanterre, Versailles, and Vaires-sur-Marnes, plus one subsite in Tahiti, the largest island of the Winward group of the Society Islands in French Ploynesia.  

The basketball preliminaries and handball finals will be held in Lille (225 km from the host city), and the sailing and some football games will be held in the Mediterranean city of Marseilles (777 km from the host city). Meanwhile, the surfing events are scheduled for the Teahuplo village in the overseas territory of French Polynesia (15,716 km from Paris). Football will also be hosted in another five cities, some of which are home to Ligue 1 clubs. They are, Bordeaux, Nantes, Décines-Charpieu (Lyon), Nice, and Saint Étienne.

Paris was awarded the Games during the 131st Session of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in the Peruvian capital, Lima, on 13 September 2017, following multiple withdrawals that left only Paris and Los Angeles in contention. The IOC approved a process to concurrently award this year’s Games and the 2028 ones to the two remaining candidate cities. Both bids were praised for their high-quality plans and innovative ways to use a record-breaking number of existing and temporary facilities.

Having previously hosted the 1900 and 1924 Games, Paris will become the second city to host the Summer Olympics on three occasions (after London in 1908, 1948, and 2012).

This year is particular for Paris as it marks the centenary of Paris 1924 and Chamonix 1924. In turn, it will mark the centenary of the Winter Olympics. As such, it will be the sixth Olympic Games hosted by France (three Summer Olympics and three Winter Olympics). The Summer Games will be returning to the traditional four-year Olympiad cycle after the 2020 Tokyo Games were postponed until 2021 because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Events like the Olympic Games are costly to organise. The 2024 Games are estimated to cost €9 billion.

The entire programme of the Paris Games, which will be the last held during Thomas Bach’s current IOC presidency, will feature 329 events in 32 sports, including the 28 “core” Olympic sports contested in 2016 and 2020 and four optional sports proposed by the Paris Organising Committee: breakdancing will make its Olympic debut as an optional sport while skateboarding, sport climbing, and surfing will return from 2020. 

One notable absentee in Paris will be the Tour de France champion, Tadej Pogacar. The Slovenian Olympic Committee (OKS) said he was ruled out of the Slovenian Olympic team “because of fatigue”.

Last Sunday, Pogacar won his third Tour de France cycling race to complete a Tour and Giro d’Italia double this year. In its statement, OKS said that Pogacar will be replaced by his national team colleague, Domen Novak. OKS congratulated the 25-year-old cyclist for his victory in the most prestigious cycling race in the world and hoped that he would represent the country at the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028.

Another absentee will be the defending Olympic champion, Richard Carapaz of Ecuador, who also won the mountain classification at this year’s Tour de France.

The 11,000 athletes in the Olympic village will be served Michelin-starred dishes and plant-based meat alternatives prepared by four Michelin-starred chefs. According to Paris 2024’s head of food, around 1,200 Michelin-starred meals will be served each day out of 40,000 overall, and around 30% of the menu during the Games will also be plant-based, with soya-based nuggets offered as an alternative.

5,084 medals featuring scrap iron from the Eiffel Tower

The winning Olympians in every event will be awarded Gold (for first), Silver (for second) and Bronze (for third) medals, which on the obverse feature embedded hexagon-shaped tokens of scrap iron taken from the original construction of the Eiffel Tower, with the Games logo engraved into it.

Approximately 5,000 medals designed by Chaumet, a luxury jewellery firm based in Paris, have been produced. The reverse of the medals features Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, inside the Panathenaic Stadium, which hosted the first modern Olympics in 1896. The Parthenon and the Eiffel Tower can also be seen in the background on both sides of the medal.

The closing ceremony will be held at Stade de France on 11 August. The ceremony will be titled ‘Records’ and will feature over a hundred performers, including acrobats, dancers, and circus artists. 

Main photo: Paris 2024