It is that time when Thomas Bach, the ultimate German bureaucrat and a man with more brass than the Berlin Philharmonic, gives his favourite stump speech. Just as no opening ceremony is complete without a gratuitous reference to his 1976 team gold medal in fencing, the president of the International Olympic Committee adores using the Games to parrot his bromides about peace, love and understanding. During a reception this week at the Elysee Palace, he claimed he had “rarely experienced such an emotional moment” as seeing all 207 teams unite at the athletes’ village in a call for goodwill to all mankind.
So far, so stirring. Except this highfalutin rhetoric seldom has much grounding in reality. In 2014, Bach talked blithely alongside Vladimir Putin of how the Sochi Winter Games would observe the “Olympic truce”, the ancient Greek tradition of war being suspended for sport.
Days later, the Russian president authorised the annexation of Crimea. At Pyeongchang 2018, he gave the impression of angling for a Nobel Peace Prize by harping on about a unified Korean ice hockey team. Needless to say, it did not take Kim Jong-un long to return to ordering missile launches.
And yet Bach’s insistence that Paris will offer the greatest showcase for Olympic ideals feels like his most elaborate pretence yet. These Games have not even started, but already we have the Dutch fielding a convicted child rapist , the British losing their star equestrienne for callously whipping a horse ,.