You’ll have seen the money shot by now. White sand, navy seats, Olympic rings of red, yellow, green, black and blue, then the small matter of just about the most iconic structure on the planet cast against a perfect, cloudless sky.
Yesterday morning, with the triathlon kiboshed by bacterial gremlins in the Seine, seemed a good opportunity to trundle down to the Eiffel Tower’s beach volleyball court and check out the scene that is making all the early running in the race to emerge as the defining image of these Games.
And not to get all wish-you-were-here about it, but even having already seen all the television montages, the drone swoops and the Instagram snaps, nothing quite prepared you for the real thing. It is utterly magnificent.
This is what Paris intended when it gambled on the weather for Friday night’s opening ceremony and lost: a Games woven into a city that could shine all on its own, little cash wasted on flash purpose-built venues, when temporary facilities set against postcard backdrops could do the job twice as well.
Other hosts have done similar things before — Rio had Copacabana, the most famous actual beach on the planet, to host its volleyball and London took the same sport to Horse Guards Parade — but never on this scale.
In Paris, there is hardly a landmark of note that has not been repurposed or transformed. The heart of the Metro map, with famous sights-turned-Olympic venues highlighted in light purple, looks like a spilt packet of parma
violets. Public transport is optional — and on a scorching day like this, as I will later discover, probably advisable, too — but a decent number of these central venues are close enough to hop between on foot. From the base of the Eiffel Tower, where deckchairs and soft Ibiza mixes add to the beach club vibe, a stroll along the Seine takes you to the Grand Palais, basically Ally Pally on steroids.
Axelle Saint-Cirel’s epic rendition of La Marseillaise from atop its roof was one of a grey opening ceremony’s redeeming moments, but since the Games officially began it has been home to fencing, historically France’s most successful Olympic sport.
Fresh from hosting a gripping all-French final of the women’s sabre on Tuesday night, the mood is again riotous as the home female épée team take to the piste for their opener against South Korea. There are four matches going on at once, but everyone is watching the same one — the bloke in the Antoine Griezmann shirt, the woman in the silly tricolour cockerel hat — as the choruses of “Allez Les Bleus” attest.
They win, though I’m no longer there to see the victorious moment, already back on the Champs Élysées for the next leg of this whistle-stop tour. But I know because of the distant cheer, the kind that makes you regret leaving a football match early when you’re halfway back to the Tube. Except for, yes, fencing. A glance right, along the sightline of Pont Alexandre III reveals the golden dome of Les Invalides, home to Napoleon’s tomb and, for these few days, Olympic archery.
Instead though it’s straight on to La Concorde, where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were executed and today, where thousands of people are watching freestyle BMX. Skateboarding and 3x3 basketball are here, too, part of the Games’ push to attract a younger, urban audience, the competitions themselves only part of the spectacle at what, between events, feels more like a family fun day.
From the number of children here giving new sports a crack, it is working.
The point here is not just about what Paris has tried to do, but that they have done it brilliantly — and London ought to take note.
If the capital is serious, as Mayor Sadiq Khan said last week it is, about bringing the Games back in 2040 this must be the model.
Just 28 years on from London 2012, there will be no need to build fresh, grand facilities. Indeed, one of the major positives of that Games’ legacy remains the absence of white elephants.
But nor should it set out to imitate a summer that now, in the rose-tinted national memory, exists as a beacon of unattainable harmonious ideal.
The 2040 Games would have to be their own, in story and, where reasonable, in stage. If athletics, cycling and swimming would likely return to their 2012 homes, then go and build a skatepark in Trafalgar Square. Take climbing — booming in popularity among young Londoners — into the Royal Albert Hall, archery into the gardens of Buckingham Palace, judo into Shakespeare’s Globe. Stick something Australians like on Clapham Common.
And also, London, learn from where Paris has gone wrong: no ceremony that doesn’t really work if it’s raining, and no swimming in the Thames.
