Maybe it’s because the past three Olympics were held in distant Asian time zones while America slept. Or perhaps it’s the sense that the two most recent Games, held in pandemic Tokyo and Beijing, seemed to happen less because of sport and more to meet the contractual obligations of sponsors and television networks. Or it might be the uncomfortable stench of human rights abuse swirling about the Beijing Games in 2022, followed four days later by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Olympics, he said, need “to get their groove back.”
In 1984, the Los Angeles Games saved a bankrupt and demoralized Olympic movement with an innovative self-funded approach that launched a golden era of booming broadcast rights and sponsorships that led to financial successes in cities such as Barcelona, Atlanta and London.
But with the Paris Games about to begin, the Olympics appear to be at another crossroads. Global leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping have used Olympics to solidify their power, mucking the Games with political quagmires and doping scandals. The costs for host cities have ballooned, and cities have been left with impractical facilities that symbolize wasteful extravagance. And there’s a growing sense that the Olympics don’t carry the same awe with younger generations as they did with those before them.
Many in the Olympic world are hoping these Games will do what Los Angeles did 40 years ago.
With Paris, Costas said, Olympic leaders “have a chance to do something really unique.”
Paris has planned a spectacle like no other Olympics before, with Opening Ceremonies on the Seine and competitions held on or beside the Champs-Élysées. The Eiffel Tower will soar over everything. Organizers have financed most of a manageable budget through private sources, and they’re placing an emphasis on art and scene and elegance.
“We need a spectacular Games,” said Terrence Burns, a sports marketing consultant who has worked for the IOC and other entities around the Olympics. “We need Paris to remind us of what it was that persuaded us to watch over the years. I can’t overstate how important Paris is to resetting expectations.”
Facing a world of problems
In November, IOC President Thomas Bach stood in the vast U.N. chamber and said the world is in a “dangerous downward spiral.”
The “scourge of war and violence is growing,” he told the General Assembly. “Political, social and economic divisions are gaining more ground.”
Later, in a hallway, he described his dire summation of society’s decline as an opportunity.
“The world is really longing for something unifying among all these tensions and confrontations,” Bach said.
The Olympics, he added, can be that something.
But can they really? Berlin’s 1936 Games helped galvanize nationalism in a pre-World War II Nazi Germany, five Olympics have been canceled because of world wars, and boycotts led by the United States in 1980 and the Soviet Union in 1984 fractured the notion that sports existed outside of politics.
Bach was at the United Nations that day for the ceremonial ratification of the Olympic Truce, a nonbinding vow based on the ancient Greek Olympics and revived in the 1990s under which world leaders agree not to attack other countries from one week before the Olympics until one week after the Paralympics. It’s the kind of document the IOC likes to uphold — and one Putin has trampled in recent years, launching invasions of Georgia, Crimea and Ukraine during the truce.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea was especially humiliating for the IOC because it took place between the 2014 Olympics and Paralympics held in a Russian resort, Sochi, a Games forever tarnished by revelations of the host country’s state-sponsored doping program.
Russia “has become the elephant in the room” for the IOC, said Michael Payne, a onetime IOC marketing executive and the author of “Olympic Turnaround,” which describes how the Games revived themselves in the 1980s and 1990s.
Putin’s attempt last year to claim athletes from the seized Ukrainian territories gave the IOC an opening to suspend the Russian Olympic Committee for Paris. Still, the attempt to allow a small number of Russians and Belarusians to compete in Paris as what the IOC calls “independent, neutral athletes” has angered many Ukrainians.
Russia, though, is far from the Olympics’ lone political problem, even if fears persist of a Russian-led cyberattack on the Paris Games similar to what U.S. officials claim occurred at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics.
In the winter of 2022, Beijing’s zero-Covid bubble, filled with dystopian images of workers in hazmat suits, showed the world a vastly different China than the optimistic one that emerged at the city’s first Olympics in 2008. It was an Olympics of strict quarantines, lockdowns and vigilant policing of dissent.
Each day, the IOC held a press briefing that included a representative from Beijing’s Olympic Organizing Committee. Western journalists flooded IOC officials with tough yet pertinent questions, while Chinese reporters directed benign, seemingly scripted queries to Beijing officials. Questions from western reporters about topics such as human rights drew immediate rebuke from the Beijing officials.
“Whatever the Olympic ideals are, [Beijing in 2022] was the antithesis of that,” Costas said.
Who wants to open their doors
Those 2022 Games were in Beijing only because Oslo, the front-runner, dropped its bid in 2015 when public support collapsed as potential costs climbed. That same year, Boston, picked by the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee as the American candidate for this summer’s Games, also backed out for similar reasons. Two years ago, British Columbia refused to fund a Vancouver bid for the 2030 Winter Olympics, saying it was too expensive. Brisbane, the 2032 summer host, is overhauling its original plan after construction expenses were higher than estimated.
The two most expensive Olympics ever were Sochi, which Russia claims cost $50 billion, and Beijing’s $44 billion Games in 2008. Voters in Western democracies don’t want to throw billions at the Olympics, especially for stadiums that won’t have a purpose afterward. This is how three Games in 15 years came to be in Russia and China.
“One of the difficulties when you have a movement that is essentially aspirational is that you have to make the Olympics opportunity available to everyone and not just those with the right principles,” said Richard Pound, a powerful IOC member who, along with Payne, helped the IOC modernize. “You end up with hard countries. You don’t want to award the Olympics to countries based on their policies; you want to award them based on their ability to organize an Olympics.”
Heather Dichter, a professor at England’s De Montfort University who studies Olympic bids, agreed costs discourage many countries from showing interest in hosting.
“The Olympics is a huge cost, and it comes with the concern of the white elephant venues as a legacy,” Dichter said. “How many sliding venues do you need in the world? Do you need a velodrome?”
Games planners are finding out. Organizers of the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics are rushing to build a sliding center in the mountains outside Cortina. The bobsled, luge and skeleton track will be on the site of a historic run abandoned in 2008 because it was too expensive to maintain. A similar fate has befallen the track in the Italian Alps built for the 2006 Turin Olympics because it, too, wasn’t used enough to justify the expense of keeping it online.
In recent years, the IOC has attempted to eliminate the elaborate and expensive promises competing cities felt compelled to make by having potential hosts negotiate privately with a small group of IOC leaders until a clear leader emerges. It’s also supposed to cut out the temptation for contending cities to bribe IOC members for their votes.
While the new awarding rules might have stopped the bidding wars, it has shrouded the process in secrecy, putting decisions that could have dramatic economic impact on cities in the hands of a tiny group of IOC officials known as the Future Host Commission. This has led to skepticism over a lack of transparency.
Still, the new approach has done something much bigger by quietly pushing the next six Olympics (Paris, Milan-Cortina, Los Angeles, French Alps, Brisbane and Salt Lake City) to places with democratically elected governments, possibly adding a seventh in 2038 by announcing extended negotiations with a Swiss bid for those Winter Games.
“What [Bach] has done is he’s de-risked the process,” Burns said. “The days are gone when you could see a Sochi or a PyeongChang win. Bids for propaganda purposes are gone.”
How much that can hold, however, is a question. Brisbane’s ability to host the 2032 Games remains in some doubt, and India Prime Minister Narendra Modi is widely expected to make a Sochi-style bid for the 2036 Summer Olympics, as are cities in China, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
The balance between cool and traditional
For years, the IOC has been able to count on robust television rights deals and corporate sponsor programs to keep the money flowing, 90 percent of which it says it distributes among sports federations. But behemoth broadcast rights deals are not guaranteed in perpetuity.
NBC, which has the U.S. rights to the Games through 2032, saw ratings for its prime-time telecast in Tokyo drop 27 percent from the Rio Olympics in 2016. Months later, the tumble in Beijing was worse, a 42 percent decline from the 2018 PyeongChang Games.
Network executives still don’t know how to assess the drop, unsure whether it’s attributable to the lifelessness of the two pandemic Olympics, a sign of a changing viewership in which streaming services cut into television ratings or a decline in audience interest.
Are there enough people under 30 to care about events such as modern pentathlon, dressage and rowing? Or even long jump and swimming? Does the long-running dominance of the U.S. women in water polo matter in a world ruled by clicks and Snaps?
“The Olympics is getting a little old; it has the potential for aging out,” said Irwin Kishner, a partner at law firm Herrick Feinstein who negotiates sponsorship deals throughout sports.
In 2014, the IOC ran what it called a “sports lab” at that year’s Nanjing Youth Olympics in China to test four sports under consideration for future Olympics. Kit McConnell, the IOC’s sports director, said the goal was to see how a different offering of sports would appeal to younger fans.
The experiment was part of a larger mandate the IOC created called Agenda 2020, a Bach initiative that became a series of recommendations to modernize and reform the Olympics. One of the key parts of Agenda 2020 (now known as Agenda 2020 Plus Five) is to make the Games more appealing to future generations.
From Nanjing came skateboarding and sport climbing, which along with surfing were added provisionally in Tokyo and formally in the past year, joining another new sport, three-on-three basketball. A similar test four years later at the youth games in Buenos Aires produced squash, which will be added at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
McConnell said he has seen the new sports bring new energy to the Olympics. Skateboarders, he said, were “maybe not fully engaged with the Olympic Games and the Olympic movement prior to skateboarding being in the Olympics,” but the addition means the Games are reaching “a massive global audience.”
“We measure that side of things through hard data,” he continued. “And we saw some really positive metrics coming through there.”
At the same time, a flood of new sports risks diluting what the Olympics historically have been. Burns cautioned that simply “chasing the red flag of youth culture” risks loading the Games with events that “are fleeting and faddish.”
Then there is what Pound calls “the dance with the esports devil”: a series of esports tournaments and now the creation of an Olympic Esports Games that will be held separately from the actual Olympics.
“It will be interesting to see if oil and water mix,” Pound grumbled.
Weeks after Pound made his comments, the IOC unveiled a partnership with the Saudi Arabia Olympic Committee to host the inaugural Olympic Esports Games in 2025, part of a 12-year deal that calls for Olympic Esports Games to be held regularly.
Burns has spent much of his career selling the splendor of an event built on peace and sport, ideals that he still holds dear. But he worries the Olympics are losing some of what he calls their “specialness.”
“All the athletes of the world would be in one place,” he said. “Now you have the world all around you. Now the world comes together all the time. It used to be that there was no such thing as seeing a Russian athlete. Now kids see Russians every day in places like the NBA and NHL.”
Olympic officials “are perpetually walking on eggshells trying to keep out of the line of fire,” Payne said. Some believe the Games’ problems get amplified without context, overshadowing the stories of inspiration.
“There’s certainly a lot of corruption in a lot of societies — it’s not more in the Olympics — but the Olympics draw more attention,” Pound said. “It’s an instant-reaction problem. But if you take a step back, is it really an Olympic problem? Or a perception problem?”
The moment is here
So it is up to Paris to make the Olympics special again. Most around the Olympic movement — from IOC officials to advertisers to television broadcasters to social media companies jumping into the Games — are pinning their hopes on these next few weeks. If Paris can’t inspire audiences with its grand boulevards and Renaissance buildings, what will?
“I think it can be a reset moment,” said Angela Courtin, YouTube’s vice president for marketing.
YouTube is betting big on the Paris Games by sending a fleet of creators to cover the proceedings in ways others can’t. So are TikTok and Snap. All say they are convinced young people are as interested as ever in the Olympics even if they might not watch traditional prime-time network telecasts. Executives from all three platforms say their data indicate that kids want to see and hear about events that unite the world.
Paris organizers, reeling after losing the 2012 Games to London, tried to impress the IOC with a proposal that encouraged fans to spend time in the middle of the city, with most of the sports in clusters near Roland Garros and the Stade de France, but not in the city center. Then, after winning the bid in 2017, they decided to go for transcendence.
Sitting in his office near the main stadium, with the tip of the Eiffel Tower peeking through the window blinds, Paris 2024 CEO Etienne Thobois said he and his staff studied building temporary stadiums to cut costs, which led them to ask how they “could make temporary extraordinary?”
As the IOC added skateboarding, 3×3 basketball and breaking to the program, 2024 planners came up with the idea of putting them all in Place de la Concorde, the site of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette’s executions and the fountain from “The Devil Wears Prada.” Then came the most outrageous idea of all: moving the Opening Ceremonies to the Seine.
“Paris is a gift that comes at a great time,” said Gary Zenkel, NBC’s president of Olympics. “Having the opening ceremony on the Seine and having the most compelling three hours [of TV] with the world watching? Yeah, bring it on!” he said. “The Olympics are going to soar on the back of that.”
The bold plan is also fraught with potential disasters. Such a wide-open ceremony can’t completely be protected. Promises to clean the Seine enough to allow the swimming portion of the triathlon might be too much to deliver, even after Paris and other municipalities have paid a total of $1.5 billion on the Seine project. A heat wave could make the temporary stadiums throughout the center of the city too hot to bear. The city’s public transit might be overwhelmed.
Tony Estanguet, the president of Paris 2024, often laments about “the pressure to be audacious.” Delivering what he has promised could become too much. But success, Pound said, could “change the way people experience the Olympics.”
Costas can’t imagine the Games fading away. Viewers will always tune in, even if it’s through new devices and apps.
Such compelling human drama won’t be “relegated to secondary-viewing status,” he said.
He looks at these next three Olympics and imagines people becoming dazzled by the beauty of Paris, the stunning scenes of the Italian mountains and the gauzy ethereal late-day glow of a Los Angeles Games and sees opportunities for the Olympics to enchant the world again.
“This is a window of opportunity, starting with Paris, a grand setting in a great historic city,” he said. “How close will [the Olympics] come to be what it once was? We’re about to find out.”
