One imagined that the announcement would be made as a jubilant French delegation celebrated in front of the world's television cameras. But when it came, the announcement that France is set to host the 2024 Olympic Games was low-key and made, in effect, by the mayor of Los Angeles Eric Garcetti. Having reached a financial agreement with the event's ruling body the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Garcetti announced that the American West Coast city would be hosting the Games in 2018. With its last serious rival thus out of the running, this leaves the way open for Paris to be designated the host city for 2024 at the next session of the IOC, to be held in Lima on September 13th.
Aside from the PR disappointment, this episode also tells us a great deal about the current attractiveness of the Games: Paris will host the event in 2014 not because it has crushed the opposition but because there was no longer anyone else who wanted to host it. Under pressure from domestic public opinion all the other cities who had made a bid – Rome, Budapest, Boston and Hamburg – pulled out in the light of the major financial problems experienced by Athens in 2004 and Rio de Janeiro in 2016. This forced the IOC to set up an unprecedented system of nominating two successive hosts at the same time, to ensure that its current Olympic model survives up to 2028.
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Officials behind the French Olympic bid have made reassuring comments to head off any opposition over the financial impact on the country. They say Paris 2024 has a reasonable and balanced budget which has been fixed at 6.6 billion euros, with half going towards building infrastructure and half towards running costs. That is 2 billion euros more than for the ill-fated attempt to host the 2012 Games but the new Paris bid team insists that while the new budget is greater, it will stay under control.
Yet already it seems impossible for the 2024 event to come in on budget. Recent Games have ended up costing double or even three times the original estimate. London 2012, for example, was supposed to cost 4.6 billion pounds when its bid was examined in 2005 but the bill reached 15 billion euros in the end. In London, as with Athens in 2004, much of the budget overshoot came from additional security costs.
It seems clear that Paris will not be able to escape a mounting security bill either. Outside safety in the stadiums and the Olympic Village, security costs have not been factored into the overall budget. To give an example, simply staging the “fan zones” at the Euro 2016 football tournament in France, where fans watched the game on giant screens, cost 12 million euros, with the state footing 66% of the bill.
There is also concern about the financing of the Olympic Village itself in Paris. The construction of this focal point of the Games at Saint-Denis north of Paris, which will house 11,000 athletes, will cost “just” 1.9 billion euros and will later become part of a housing scheme. It will be financed via a private-public partnership which has still to be clearly defined. But based on the lessons from London it will doubtless accelerate the transfer of property into private hands. Some of the new homes built in the British capital for the 2012 Games are now owned by Qatar's sovereign wealth fund.
Then there is the question of the economic benefits that staging the Olympics will bring to Paris, the calculations for which are currently still uncertain. The Paris bid committee asked the Centre for the Law and Economics of Sport (CDES) based in Limoges, central France, to evaluate the benefits. Depending on the scenario, the centre estimated between 5.3 billion and 10.7 billion euros in economic benefits, mostly to tourism (27% to 35% of the benefits) and the construction industry (around 18%). Apart from that the public has very little information on which to form an opinion on the likely benefits of hosting the 2024 Olympics. The only study on the impact of Euro 2016 appears invalidated as it was carried out by one of the beneficiaries of the event.
The CDES study rightly points to the absence of 'white elephant' infrastructure projects in the Paris bid. Apart from the Olympic Village and the new media centre which will subsequently become housing, the only major new construction will be the new Olympic pool. This will be built at Saint-Denis, close to the existing sports stadium the Stade de France and it represents a chance for local councillors to ensure long-awaited infrastructure finally comes to the area. The president of the local Plaine Commune urban council, Patrick Braouzec, was correct when he told Libération in June that if Paris did host the Games it would also bring a “guarantee that the Grand Paris Express metro will happen on time, that the high-voltage power lines will be buried underground and that sound barriers will be built along the A86”.
Green politician Hélène Lipietz, former secretary to the urban policy committee on the Paris regional council, wrote that “infrastructure will without doubt be created more quickly”. Those remarks were in fact written as a critique of the 2012 Paris bid but have been republished in the light of the 2014 candidacy. Referring particularly to transport projects, she regrets the way that sporting events encourage politics to act quickly rather than the other way around. “You either have the money to carry out [this infrastructure expenditure] and they must be done as quickly as possible anyway before the [Paris] region dies from pollution, or you haven't got the money to build this infrastructure and you take from other budgets to build them in time for the [Olympic Games], leaving so many other problems to one side,” she says. This observation carries even more impact given the recent revelation that President Emmanuel Macron is planning to cut the urban policy budget in order to help balance the nation's books.
The final benefit put forward by the French bid is that of the 2024 event's “intangible” legacy. This includes the boost to the country's international image that hosting the Games will give to Paris and France after recent years marked by terrorists attacks, and also the impact on the development of both social and elite sport within France itself. These are, however, unquantifiable benefits set against very real and quantified expenditure.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter