The city of kings is unusually sporty at the start of summer. And for good reason, many athletes stroll through the streets of Reims, proudly wearing their team's uniform, to the great surprise of the people of Réims who are not always informed. Several dozen athletes have already started to take over the city, and continue to arrive slowly to prepare for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. In fact, three countries (the United Kingdom, Finland and the Norway) have chosen the Cité des Sacres and its various sports complexes as a preparation center. Several disciplines are represented: swimming, gymnastics, boxing, athletics, table tennis and trampoline.
The first to arrive were the British, on July 17, with their very large aquatic team which includes 30 swimmers including 13 women, and around twenty coaches and doctors. “We have been working with Team GB for a little over two years,” explains Élodie Lombardo, “Terre de Jeux” project manager in Reims. “The swimmers have already come for a few days in June 2023 for a “training camp” in order to get their first bearings with the site.” The latter, the recent UCPA which opened its doors in 2021 and which is made up of several large pools including one in the open air, therefore remains closed to the public for a short week.
“Obviously there are people who are not very happy,” admits Élodie Lombardo, “but most of the Rémois people are very understanding.” A security agent, who wishes to remain anonymous, indicates that "a few people come anyway, because they don't know", and "mention a lack of communication". He alludes to the weather, “unkind since the start of summer and the temperatures which are only starting to warm up” to justify the annoyance of the families. “They sometimes insist, but we kindly explain to them that swimmers are training for the Olympics, that it is only for a week and that there are other pools open and they are generally understanding.” “It’s all in the way you explain!” he concluded cheerfully.
In the different pools of the complex, out of sight and in the intense heat, swimmers train. In the main pool, a speaker plays pop music to motivate the troops. The coaches are busy, shouting instructions while trying to drown out the noise and filming the performances to then watch them with the athletes. On the stands, a few volunteers responsible for ensuring that training runs optimally watch the athletes attentively. They are the only lucky ones, along with the press, allowed to attend the preparation sessions.
Among them, Lucie and Jean, 18 years old, both students at Sciences Po Reims and sports enthusiasts. Lucie is on her day off but she still came to carefully observe the swimmers. “I have been interested in sport since I was very little, and being a volunteer was really an opportunity,” she says with a broad smile. For his friend Jean, it’s a little bit of pride: “I’m English, and something like that in Reims doesn’t happen every day!” Samuel, 26, who has just graduated with a master's degree in communication and media, also shares their opinion: "the Olympics are not often in France, and what's more, there are athletes in my city..."
The missions of these volunteers are diverse, but the most important is to ensure that they are in the best possible conditions to train: to drive the athletes and their teams to their hotel, to remain available in case of the slightest need. “We ensure that they have an exceptional level of comfort and that they can be in the best conditions to train,” summarizes Jean enthusiastically.
A mission which seems successful for the moment: “We are lucky to be in this wonderful place where everything is very centralized, we can even return to the hotel by walking,” underlines Ben Proud, swimmer from Team GB who specializes in butterfly and freestyle swimming, and was notably crowned world champion in the 50m butterfly during the 2017 World Championships. Comfort that is not always guaranteed to athletes.
Indeed, every minute is counted in these days where the agenda is precise. British swimmers have two training sessions in the pools per day, lasting 2 to 3 hours each, as well as strength and fitness sessions supervised by their coaches. “As the games approach, we prioritize sleep and rest,” explains Ben Proud, who says he gets up at 8 a.m. every morning. “We slow down the pace to work on very specific things before the competitions, we are very concentrated in this Olympic bubble.”
This intense concentration does not prevent the athletes from being “all kind and very approachable,” as Lucie, Jean and Samuel report. The city's mayor, Arnaud Robinet, also received good feedback from the athletes when he came to visit them on July 19. “The athletes explained to him that it was the first time that they had such an efficient site before the Olympic Games,” says Élodie Lombardo, witness to the meeting. The swimmers will be the first to leave Reims on July 23, heading to the Parisian Olympic village. But the Rémois will still be able to benefit from other Norwegian and Finnish athletes, who plan to train in the city of Sacres until the beginning of August.
In four days, it happens. At 20:30 in the evening, hundreds of thousands of people including athletes, photographers, dancers, singers, staff members, volunteers, coaches, heads of state, security forces and spectators will gather along the Seine River to watch the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. These will be the first games to be played with an audience for the first time in eight years and no wonder it will be a ceremony with the largest number of viewers ever.
So before we get into the competitions themselves, these are the numbers behind the 16 days of the Olympic Games in Paris: 10,500 athletes will compete in 32 sports during the Games. They will spend time in 5 Olympic villages and play in 35 competition sites - including one in Tahiti, which is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and where surfing competitions will be held.
Paris itself will host the Games for the third time, having done so in the second Olympiad in the new era (1900) and the eighth Olympiad in 1924. France spent $9.57 billion on hosting preparations, with $3.8 billion coming from taxpayers. In Tokyo, by the way, this number rose to 15.4 billion dollars.
As part of the envelope of the Olympic Games, 45 thousand volunteers will take part during the competitions and 150 thousand jobs will be filled. In addition to them, 30,000 policemen and gendarmes will secure the various events, the athletes and the spectators who will arrive.
Speaking of spectators, we have already mentioned the fact that this is the large amount of spectators that will be present at the Olympic Games. 326 thousand spectators will be along the Seine River for the first time that the ceremony will be held outside the stadium, when the arrivals of the delegations will be on 94 boats. The idea was taken from the opening ceremony of the Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires 2018 that took place at the obelisk.
Regardless of opening ceremony viewership, 10 million tickets were sold for the Olympic Games, with an estimated television audience of 4 billion. There is an equal distribution of male and female athletes at the Paris Olympics, where there are 20 mixed events for men and women. Those athletes will fight for 329 gold medals made from pieces of the Eiffel Tower, which will come in the form of hexagonal tokens forged from scrap metal from the world's most famous monument.
Time to move to the Israeli delegation: 88 sportsmen and women will take part in the Olympic Games in 15 branches and 20 professions. They will be surrounded by 75 branch professional staff members, 30 medical staff and six training opponents. Whoever wins a gold medal will be rewarded with one million NIS.
And finally, something less sporty. The mascot of the Olympic Games is called Friggs, which looks like the Phrygian bonnet - a red headdress but with the end pulled forward. It symbolizes the excellence of the French Revolution and the Republic, a value that is taught in all classrooms in the country.
