The Paris Olympics are the most French thing ever – for better or worse

From the outrageous opening ceremony to the organizational screw-ups, the games will surely go down in history for all the wrong reasons

French culture isn’t just about masked balls at Versailles anymore. As the Paris Olympic Games have proven, it’s now also debating whether drag queens’ balls were adequately masked. 

Looks like Thomas Jolly, the Games’ Opening Ceremony director, is just now coming to the realization that the entire world doesn’t function like Paris Left Bank intellectuals. He bit off more than he could chew by transmitting a French art house vibe to every country around the globe, some of which – from Morocco and Algeria to China and the US – straight up censored parts of the show that perhaps should have come with a disclaimer in the same way that risqué French films do.

Because it turns out that kids – and even some adults – weren’t quite ready to witness a giant Smurf rolling around in a fruit bowl in front of a bunch of drag queens re-enacting what appeared to be the Last Supper. And the fact that French blasphemy laws were abolished two years after the French Revolution, enshrining a right that became a cornerstone of French free speech, didn’t matter to those who felt offended, which included everyone from religious figures to left-wing France Unbowed leader Jean-Luc Melenchon.

France has defended religious satire as free expression, even when cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed led to a terrorist massacre in January 2015 at the Parisian headquarters of the magazine Charlie Hebdo, which published them. So this is just France being France, which wasn’t very well received, including by some of the most progressive-minded French officials.

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One US-based advertiser – the wireless company C Spire – has already said it was yanking their Olympic advertising. Guess there’s a dice roll with the risk that your product might end up somewhere in the vicinity if a clip or screencap of a bunch of drag queens, or a saucy Papa Smurf, and that wasn’t quite the vibe that you were going for when you signed up for high-level sports sponsorship.

There was also an onslaught of reports of X (former Twitter) social media users being hit with copyright takedown notices for posting some of the controversial scenes from the opening show for debate and discussion. Not surprising that the International Olympic Committee, guardian of the Olympic brand, might not want the images etched into history of these Games, to be dominated by things like closeups of drag queens' crotches for the purpose of debating whether the world actually witnessed some fruit tumbling out of a pair of plum smugglers in a wardrobe malfunction – or whether it was just an everyday pantyhose rip. You know, the kind of thing that could happen to any dude in an average day at the office.

The Games have really showcased that world-famous French rigor.

Whoever was in charge of the anthems for the men’s basketball games apparently saw that South Sudan was playing and just figured that the national anthem for Sudan would do. It’s like during the opening ceremonies when South Korean athletes were introduced as North Koreans. Same thing, really.

One of the best things about these Games are the adorable mascots, the Phryges, based on the French Revolutionary hats of the same name. But at this point, can we get these little bright-red cuties to amp up the Gallic shrugging? Because that’s what’s really now become the main vibe of these Games.

No air conditioning amid 33C heat in the Olympic village or athletes’ rooms because the French greenwashed their cheapness as “eco-friendly”? Shrug. Competitors complaining about the lack of high protein eggs and meat at the village chow halls because Games organizers figured that elite athletes could just eat like rabbits for the sake of the planet (and of profit margins, no doubt)? Shrug. The world is now discovering the kind of reception that I get at my local gym when they block whatever climate control exists at 26C in the middle of summer. That would be a “you” problem. Shrug. Some countries’ delegations took the initiative of supplying their own air conditioners, just as Team Great Britain ended up bringing over their own chefs so their athletes could be properly fed for high performance.

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The trains stopped running last week around France due to sabotaged lines. Israel has already blamed that on Iran. The average French person’s mind just went straight to everyday, garden variety French incompetence – the kind that would also would explain all the heavy-handed “security theatre” during the Games.

The government required everyone to apply online for QR Codes if they wanted to even cross the downtown core, which was turned into a maze of 44,000 barricades days before the opening ceremony. And the excuse had to be a good one – like you lived there or had an appointment. And the Interior Ministry had already used the Games as a pretext for loading up on new high-tech surveillance systems, from surveillance drones and anti-drone systems to crowd scanners coupled with Minority Report style artificial intelligence algorithms. If all of it actually worked, then why give people the run-around? If their surveillance-industrial complex pals were going to stuff their pockets under the pretext of Games security, then couldn’t they just spy on us in peace without all the added bureaucratic nonsense?

Speaking of national security, a bunch of hackers leaked the military background of Israeli athletes, a country with mandatory service and currently involved in an active conflict criticized by the UN’s International Court of Justice and accused of apartheid – an offense that the IOC explicitly cites as justification for Games exclusion. Meanwhile Russian athletes who have never even been in the army can’t even compete in their country’s name. So what happens if a Russian wins a gold medal? The IOC created a special flag just for them, which looks like someone’s kid whipped it up in about five minutes on an app. They also made a new anthem with no lyrics for Russian athletes that sounds like the opening soundtrack for a make-believe fantasy movie. Which is really what all this is: one big Hollywood-grade fantasy that one of the top Olympic nations since forever doesn’t even exist now at the Olympics.

And remember those €1.4 billion to clean up the Seine River for the triathlon and open water events? The mayor of Paris and French sports minister rolled around in it for about a minute, gushing about how wonderful the water was.

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Well, it turns out that triathlon practice was cancelled on Sunday and Monday. Too much fecal bacteria. Organizers had until Tuesday’s men’s race to figure it all out. Then, on Tuesday, at 4am,  they announced that the men’s triathlon would be postponed to Wednesday, right after the scheduled women’s race, with both triathlons “subject to the forthcoming water tests complying with the established World Triathlon thresholds for swimming.” 

The backup plan, which they had seven years to come up with? Just to have the running and cycling without the swimming. Which is a whole other sport called a duathlon. Close enough though, right?

As for the swimming, it turns out that they messed up and didn’t build enough seats into the Olympic pool venue for it to actually host the Olympic swimming, so they were forced to install a temporary swimming pool inside Paris La Défense Arena, where Taylor Swift recently performed. That pool is now the subject of much speculation among members of the sporting press and global swimming community, who are wondering whether the pool’s notable lack of depth or some other aspect of the makeshift construction is responsible for relatively slow swims at this meet. “Zero World Records have been broken at the 2024 Paris Olympics through two nights of competition in the pool. The last time that no World Record was broken after just one day of competition was 1992, but here we are, entering night three with zero,” one of the world’s leading swimming news and discussion outlets, SwimSwam, remarked in asking whether the Paris pool was just “slow”.

That world famous French discipline – really shining right now on the world stage. Thankfully, the athletes – in all their unforced diversity through meritocracy – have taken center stage despite being relegated to background actors in the opening show, having to share boats with other countries like they were Uber carpools. Except the refugees. Organizers gave them their own boat to sail down the Seine, smiling and waving. But with the way these Games are being run, it’s a wonder that it hasn’t just ended up in Britain.