The Olympics are all about the gold, but Paris also wants to go green. Organizers in France’s capital have pledged to cut the event’s carbon footprint by half. That means cardboard beds, water-based cooling systems, and plant-based meals. But the Games opened in a heat wave with temperatures as high as 97 degrees. Many athletes, including all 600 Americans, brought portable air conditioners to their rooms in the Olympic village. And fans worldwide hopped on planes to see the competitions in-person, unlike four years ago when COVID meant spectators couldn’t travel to Tokyo.
Madeleine Orr, professor of sports ecology at the University of Toronto, says the Olympic organizers made big promises that became half fulfilled. They wanted to use no air conditioning in the village, then ordered 2500 A/C units. They planned to serve more vegan and vegetarian food compared to past Games, then last-minute brought in steak and eggs.
Still, she points to one behind-the-scenes win: All broadcasts are happening on an electric grid. “The energy grid in France in general is pretty good. I think it’s more than half that comes from green sources. There's not really anything coming from coal. Some oil and gas, yes, but it's in a mix of other things. … As France moves towards a green grid … we're not ever using generators in Paris, sport events, ever moving forward.”
Why did French organizers want these Olympics to be so green? Orr says showboating is happening, and President Emmanuel Macron and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo are making a power play.
“They needed this political win. … The International Olympic Committee committed to the environment as the third pillar of the Olympic movement in 1994, 30 years ago. And they committed to that in Paris, the IOC Congress in ‘94 was actually in Paris. And then fast forward to nine years ago, and the Paris Agreement was signed there. So there's a lot of symmetry around Paris and sustainability that they really wanted to capitalize on and tell that story.”
The next games will be in Los Angeles. The city is making an environmentally-friendly move by turning to venues it already has — such as Exposition Park’s Memorial Coliseum, Carson’s Velodrome, downtown’s Convention Center — instead of building new ones. The athletes will stay at college campuses rather than an all-new Olympic Village.
The challenge, however, will center on transit. “In Paris, all of the ground transport is happening in either electric busses, or on public transit, or bikes, or walking. In LA, that infrastructure is not really there, especially getting from a venue like SoFi Stadium out to USC, and then over to the coast for surfing. … They're going to have to figure that out.”
Plus, “LA, it's a famously showy city … We can expect loads of tourists to descend on that city for that event, and I don't see any way that's going to be a perfectly green project,”
The Olympics should instead sell tickets to locals first and reduce the number of international spectators, Orr advises.
However, as climate change drives temperatures up, could a future exist where the Summer Games can’t happen at all in certain cities?
“I think we're already there. We're just not talking about it, right? Indonesia has a bid in to host the games, I think, in 2036. That's a no go, as far as I'm concerned. And the IOC views it very much the same way — they're concerned about certain places being too hot to handle an Olympics. … So if the number of options is getting slim, I think there's going to have to be a little bit of creativity around the calendar. Can we push this to September? Can we explore options maybe for the spring? How does that impact the rest of the sporting calendar?”