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 .