Day or night, the Eiffel Tower has a magnetic pull on visitors to the Games. PARIS – At 35,000 feet, a hero from Paris appears in the thin air. There he is running fiercely on the screen exactly a hundred years ago in France as a familiar, uplifting music filters through the headphones.
It is only fitting that a flight to Paris 2024 begins in 1924 with the Chariots Of Fire. In one scene, Harold Abrahams, the eventual 100m Olympic champion from England, is sitting in a restaurant with a young lady and explains to her who he is. Something more intense than just a lover of something.
“I am more of an addict. It’s a compulsion.” The muscled and the mighty of this modern Games know about such fixations.
Adrenaline. Competition. Struggle.
Winning. It is these very cravings which have brought them together to this place. To this city of fashion have come the models of sports’ most tense catwalks.
Matt Dawson, the Australian hockey player, injured his ring finger and had two options. Put in a wire, heal slowly and miss the Olympics. Or lop off the top of it.
He chose amputation. Elsewhere one flag bearer for El Salvador is the 1.65m Uriel Canjura.
His nation has never won a medal at the Games and no El Salvadorian has ever wielded a badminton racket at a Games. Defiance is a theme here. One man who knows this well suddenly emerges into the sunlight from the Palais des Congres de Paris.
Novak Djokovic has a small entourage and walks like a man sure of his step. The Olympics occasionally offer these random hero sightings and, after initial gawking, strangers ask for autographs and pictures. The Serb stops, he smiles.
He is used to the interruptions which fame brings. Sport at the Olympics began days ago but the opening ceremony makes the start official. Then sport will feel like a tsunami which does no damage but only overwhelms you.
Right now everyone is just a bit giddy with anticipation. In the seat next to me on the Singapore Airlines flight is a Nike executive from Australia and immediately we begin discussing Cathy Freeman, the 400m champion from Sydney 2000. Become an Olympic legend and immortality is guaranteed.
Paris at first glimpse is noisy, confused, kind and beautiful. Like athletes, host cities take a while to flex their talent. Volunteers, the oxygen of any Games, are already practising patience.
The lack of Olympic branding down some city streets is almost conspicuous and the transport systems feel modest. At the press centre there is already an early buzzword. A “minimalistic” Games.
For some a grumble, for some gratitude. A bus driver gets briefly lost. Everyone shrugs.
The heat on July 25 rains down on cafe tables where Ernest Hemingway might have once offered wisdom. On the left, a javelin throw away from our hotel is the Statue of Liberty. To the right, 1,500m away rises the steel lacing which is the Eiffel Tower.
This city will not be easily impressed. It is familiar with the monumental feat. At the Village Olympique a professor of linguistics would break into a grin at the multiple languages rattling through the trees.
The shop selling official merchandise is over-priced but this five-ring festival is big business. Outside a group of Cape Verde athletes wander by. Then some wide-shouldered Japanese.
This village, one can safely say, is the fittest square mile in the world right now. Gendarmes stand at the city’s street corners, some kitted out with impressive weaponry. Sirens ring but security doesn’t feel suffocating yet.
Perhaps the only assaults that are openly taking place is what we are all doing to the pronunciation of French words. Visitors simply have no merci but citizens smile and say “bonjour”. James Thurber, the humorist and cartoonist, once noted that “the whole of Paris is a vast university of art, literature and music.
.. Paris is a seminar, a postgraduate course in everything.
” This fortnight it offers a degree in seizing your moment. Like Paavo Nurmi did in 1924. The legendary Finn won the 1,500m and then roughly 100-plus minutes later also the 5,000m.
The Seine, beside which Napoleon asked for his ashes to be placed, flows serenely past our hotel and mounted police unhurriedly clip-clop over one of the multiple bridges. The Olympics is about to commence its gallop, though dawn comes sullenly on the 26th, the day of the Opening Ceremony. The drizzling skies look mournful but soon will be rent with cheers.
In the Official History of the Olympics Games it is said that the first stadium at the Ancient Olympics was 200m long, a length determined by how far Hercules could walk while holding his breath. It is how long the railway platform a colleague and I wait on feels like. The train is double-storeyed and it pauses for a while at Avenue Foch.
Alight here for Roland Garros it says. Ah, this city is one giant seduction. Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
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