Hamilton: Paris Games were never going to be perfect, but no Olympics ever are (2024)

The days are dwindling on the Paris Games. And how these Summer Olympics are remembered is yet to be determined.

But this fact is as sturdy as the Eiffel Tower, or the boat that floated 594 American athletes down the River Seine on opening night:

It won’t be considered perfect. The Olympics just don’t do perfect. No games will be awarded a perfect "10."

This isn’t new. There is always a rub or a caveat or some Coliseum-sized buzzkill tethered to summer and winter glory. Sometimes it’s rooted in political divisions, sometimes performances that flat-out disappoint.

Other times, it’s merely something to rain on the Olympic parade just for the sake of it. Schadenfreude is legit and it’s global.

Example: The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics dominated by the host team. Americans rolled up a ton of medals, recruited a generation of future athletes and made icons out of the likes of Mary Lou Retton and Carl Lewis.

Yet that performance is kind of discounted as the result of a Cold War coldshoulder by the Soviet Union. It was a tit-for-tat boycott because the U.S. sat out the 1980 Moscow games, thus blemishing those Olympics, too. What’s left are critics who seem to insinuate that gold isn’t gold unless every athlete in the world— from the elite of the elite to Joe Weekendwarrior— competes.

But beyond the competition, Los Angeles was also something of a unicorn in that it actually turned a profit. And it's called out for that, too, some pointing to it as the nexus where the Olympic ideal and corporate sponsorsgot matching tattoos.

That's a shame because it's a tremendous accomplishment considering the financial toll so many other hosts have suffered. Montreal is still crawling out of a $1.5 billion pit from hosting the 1976 Summer Games that was supposed to cost "only" around $124 million.

And someone please throw up a hand if they bump into Dmitry Chernyshenko, president of the victorious Sochi Organizing Olympic Committee. Well, victorious only in that it won the bid to host the 2014 Winter Olympics with a $12.3 billion pledge.

However, it ended up costing nearly $30 billion and producing around $55 billion in debt – 95 percent of that obliged to Russia’s citizens. Those folks will spend years having to pay $1 billion a year to chip away at it.

You good, Dmitry? Let us know you’re OK.

Saying yes and no

“I think to get the Games you have to say ‘yes’ to everything,” said Harvey Schiller, a graduate of The Citadel and a Charleston resident. “Then once you get it, you’ve got a budget and you’ve got to start saying ‘no’ to things.”

Schiller, a former executive director of the United States Olympic Committee, gets it. And it seems simple when he puts is that way.

In the case of Sochi, the Russians ignored the second part of the formula and created all kinds of fiscal hardships (still worried about you, Dmitry). The French, however, paid attention.

The Paris Games stand to have a final price tag of about $9 billion, a bargain among Olympic games in the 21st century. That’s less than half the price of the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games ($23.6 billion) and nearly $5 billion cheaper than Tokyo’s $13.7 billion cost three years ago.

And the Games are funneling cash all over France.

The French expect a multi-billion-dollar economic impact that’ll continue over the next 10 years. It’s something called “the Olympic effect” and there’s chat of Paris getting into the rotation sooner than most repeat hosts. Even talk of creating a permanent host site is percolating. We’ll get confirmation if Snoop Dogg buys a summer home near Versailles.

No-win situation

Still, despite all of this, the Paris games will be as criticized as any other.

Complaints from athletes about sub-par this or a lack of that. One nation or another claiming bias. A global viewing audience that helicopters in and out, yet always seems to be watching. Future hosts looking for a low bar to meet when their time comes. There will be a tight battle to see who gets the gold medal in nitpicking.

It’s a no-win situation regardless how things wrap up. And make no mistake about it: They’ve got to stick the landing in the closing ceremonies.

"They” includes the organizers of the 2028 Games in Los Angeles. The way L.A. receives the baton is as important as to how Paris hands it off in that it starts the clock for breaking down those Games.

Meanwhile, the ongoing postmortem on what’s transpired in France over the last few days will ramp up. The best news is that the events themselves— other than some unfortunate weather and some lingering environmental issues with the river— have gone off at an Olympic level.

“At the end of the day, the most important things are security and field of play,” Schiller said, “(and) that nothing disturbs the athletic events. So long as that goes well and there’s nothing interfering with that, then I think it’s a good Olympics.”

Again, that’s simplifying the formula. So, Tony Estanguet, chief organizer of the Paris Games, you’re good to go.

One more time: Anyone seen Dmitry?