The decision to forgo air conditioning in the athletes’ rooms in the Olympic Village in Paris had been made with the noblest intentions: to save the planet from the climate emergency.
But after receiving a slew of complaints and pivoting to allow national delegations to reserve mobile air conditioning units at their own expense, the organisers in Paris are facing accusations of creating a two-tier Games.
Those who paid up for the units, including the France team, are sleeping comfortably but with the capital sweltering under a heatwave, Bernadette Szocs, a Romanian table tennis player, said she and her teammates had resorted to keeping their terrace doors open all night in hope of some relief from the heat.
“There is no air conditioning, just this fan and it is not enough,” she said. “Somehow we were lucky that it was not so hot outside so we didn’t need it so much but it is now hot and you can feel it is too hot in the room.
“[The fan] is not powerful enough and when it is pointing at you it is good but after it is turning you don’t feel it. We are sleeping with the door open in the night. The rooms are small and we are two persons.”
A spokesperson for Paris 2024 said athletes were being advised to drink lots of fluids, open windows at night and keep the blinds closed during the day.
“We remind everyone that, when it comes to high heat, we’ve tried to find a balance in the design and fit-out of the village between a long-term objective to create a model sustainable neighbourhood of the future; and a short-term responsibility to give high-performance athletes the best conditions in which to prepare,” the spokesperson said.
“For what is often the biggest competition of their athletes’ lives, certain National Olympic Committees have chosen to equip themselves with additional mobile cooling units.
“These appliances are at their own cost, and Paris 2024 is offering support by proposing air conditioners that will subsequently be made available to Paralympic athletes. Additional solutions will be made available to the athletes, such as fans, or a few mobile air conditioning units for the most exposed rooms.”
The issue of air conditioning had been a hot one before the Games. As part of Paris’s commitment to a greener Olympics, it was decided that air conditioning would not be installed with officials instead promising that the athletes rooms would be kept cool through a geothermal water system pumping cold water underneath the buildings.
The Paris Games is aiming to reduce its total carbon emissions to half the level of previous Olympics.
Pressed on the issue last year the Paris’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, told reporters: “I have a lot of respect for the comfort of athletes, but I think a lot more about the survival of humanity. I want the Paris Games to be exemplary from an environmental point of view.”
The International Olympic Committee claimed the building’s system would achieve a target temperature of 23-26C at the hottest time of the day in a heatwave but those assurances did not convince a number of the larger, and wealthier, countries including Great Britain, Australia, the US, and even hosts France.
“This is a high-performance Games,” the Australian Olympic Committee chief executive, Matt Carroll, told Australian media last year. “We’re not going for a picnic.”
Organisers reluctantly agreed to provide temporary air conditioning units that would be charged as extras on what are called “rate cards” to those who reserved them.
National delegations had ordered 2,700 air conditioning units, the organisers said, but there are more than 7,000 rooms in the Olympic village.
It is not the only complaint from athletes that had led to wealthier countries going the extra mile to help their athletes while others had to make do.
Team GB flew out their own cook after shortages led to the rationing of high-protein items and service of uncooked meat in the Olympic Village canteen.
Szocs, 29, said she had been surprised to find that the restaurant had run out of protein when she returned to the Olympic village after competing. “Normally, I like to eat meat,” she said.
