By Sandra Borges Tavares
Sandra Borges Tavares holds a PhD in Youth, Media and Memory Studies from King’s College London University. She is an invited Assistant Professor at the Portuguese Catholic University since 2023. Her upcoming book, Youth citizenship and the intangible legacies of the Olympic games, will be published this year by Palgrave Macmillan.
‘Legacies’ are complex and hard to assess. In the case of the Olympic Games, the concept has become paramount for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and all the entities involved in the bidding process, planning, development, and successful delivery of this mega-event. ‘Legacy’ can be viewed through different lenses, they may be tangible or intangible, and may be assessed against a variety of criteria. A legacy can be anything from the emotional construction of the Olympic Games through the memories, rituals, and symbols left behind (Cashman 2013; Agha, Fairley and Gibson 2012), the level of participation and engagement in sports, improvements through new revenue streams and infrastructure built in the host cities, or the development of public transportation. But, most importantly, ‘legacy’ is also a future-oriented concept with great gravitas for democratic societies, impacting their cultural and social policies as well as the various forms of active citizenship and other enactments of civic participation outside the traditional system.
The 2024 Paris Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games could not be timelier in terms of the opportunities they offer to seize the current moment of political instability around the world and, of course, locally, around the inconclusive French legislative elections. Beyond the competitions, these highly mediatized global events can be seen as an excellent arena for citizens from all walks of life to participate in and engage with their societies in what Hannah Arendt called an “active public sphere” (Arendt 2013; Habermas 1991). This includes, among other things, expressions of national, local, or even transnational identity, ideology, race, and religion. The media’s potential in this context is enormous by allowing such displays in the Olympic arena to be viewed globally.
Despite the fact that the IOC is clear on the banning of any political statements by athletes on the stage, or during any competition including the opening and closing ceremonies, there are many cases throughout the history of the Olympics where the Games have been used to express political or ideological feelings.
Take, for example, the famous Black Power or “human rights” salute given by US-American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos during the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico. Or, to give a more recent example, this year, Palestinian athlete Waseem Abu wore a shirt at the opening ceremony which displayed airplanes bombing children. In this last case, the IOC accepted the request from Palestine to have this type of display, while declining the one from the Israeli Olympic team to be allowed to wear yellow ribbons as a call for the return of hostages held by Hamas.
According to Thomas Bach, President of the IOC, the values of solidarity, equality, and human dignity, upheld by the Olympic Games, have never been as important as now. Speaking at the opening session of the Paris 2024 Summer Olympic Games, the message that Bach left was somewhat aligned with what other organizations and governmental bodies around the world have been advocating for the last decades or more: leading by example for a better world. But what does that mean, in practical terms?
The modern history of the modern Olympic Games tells us that controversy has prevailed and, in the end, some of the so-called managerial and, frankly, magical discourse about legacy is, from this critic’s point of view, nothing more than a discourse of flattening standards of expertise to strengthen the IOC model of franchising (MacAloon 2008). Or, to put it differently: this is discourse meant to have the Olympic Games look good from the outside. Still, the Games are always viewed by its host countries and cities as an opportunity to promote their own images globally, increase economic leverage, bring about a sense of national pride (whatever that means for the citizens), and expand the reach of their soft power globally.
It is precisely in light of the recent elections in France and the subsequent fragmentation of the French citizenry—as well as the rise of extreme-right political movements across Europe—that the Games were utilized (and quite well at that) by French President Emmanuel Macron to re-unite France by welcoming diversity and calling for a political truce around the world. The fantastic show put together for the Opening Ceremony may indeed just be a beam of light as compared to the many more these Games will leave as key memories.
Throughout the ceremony, the French were able to unveil (both in format and content) the core of their values, but also, at a deeper level, a message to the world that France is aligned with Olympic ideals, namely respect for other cultures, embracing diversity, and—even more importantly—standing against any sort of discrimination based on race, religion, or political ideologies. The show may not have pleased everyone, given the different types of symbolic inferences it tried to elevate and the interpretations each viewer would give to them. But, as has always been the case, the Olympics’ opening and closing ceremonies are a place for contestations where nations can prove to be more than geographical entities: they can engender a discursive construct for the “imagined community” (Anderson 2006).
The 2024 Games have made a positive impression about the values and legacy they intended to leave, not just with the promise of leveraging the games to make society more inclusive (which could just be seen as IOC semantics), but through the different elements and representations visible in the opening session.
From heavy metal performances from Gojira to the more mainstream but outstanding voice of Céline Dion, or the recurrent presence of EU messages like the display of the European Union motto “United in diversity”—so far, they are all promising in terms of a positive long-lasting legacy for a more united, more inclusive universal event.
The intangible legacies of such mediatized events are always tricky to assess, but France appears to have started off in a good way. Even despite all the criticism towards the ceremony, it managed to put people around the world in conversation and foster discussions on important and intangible topics such as gender, religion, equality, and diversity, among others. So far, so good— but now that the Games have ended it’s time to look more closely at the impact it had in terms of its legacies. This includes not just the ceremonies, but everything else that Paris promised in its bidding plan, such as the positive impact on local communities, making sports accessible and beneficial for everyone including young people, and the continuing social-environmental plans, just to mention a few. The Games may be over, but the (good) work should continue.
Cover photo: Paris2024
