Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Is France capable of hosting the 2024 Olympics?

The country has never been so divided

(Credit: Getty images)

Five years ago, Paris was named the host city for the 2024 Olympics. How the country celebrated. No one more than its fresh-faced president Emmanuel Macron. ‘I salute this success and the tremendous opportunity that the Games represent to assist in the transformation of our country,’ he declared.

Macron was speaking in a wider context, too. The Olympics was one strand of what he envisioned as a whole-scale transformation of the republic into a start-up nation, a modern, harmonious and prosperous country.

How has that worked out, Monsieur Le President? France has never been so divided. The raucous National Assembly – where the left and the right holler and jeer at each other – is representative of the bitter tribalism taking root across the country.

While enthusiasm for the Games has diminished since 2017, the budget has gone in the other direction. Back in 2017, the Paris organisers set a budget of €6.6 billion (£5.5 billion) for the Olympics. They were adamant that they wouldn’t go down the same ruinous route as the previous three hosts, Rio, London and Beijing, all of whom saw their initial budgets dwarfed by the final bill. In London’s case, what had started with a £2.4 billon budget ended up costing £8.7 billion.

Macron does love to grandstand on the global stage

Earlier this week, Jean-Pascal Gayant, a sports economist, warned that the final cost of hosting the Paris Games is likely to be around €9 billion (£7.5 billion). It could be more given the galloping inflation and the rising costs of building materials. For a country whose national debt is 112 per cent of its GDP, these are serious sums.

Still, on the plus side, this week the Paris Games unveiled the official slogan: ‘Games Wide Open’, set to a video which promised the 2024 Olympics will be ‘more inclusive, more brotherly, more beautiful’.

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