Translated by Olympics Watch. See the September 2024 original in French by Saccage 2024.
The enthusiastic discourse about the Olympics, relentlessly served up by the Paris 2024 organizers and a large part of the media, cannot mask the reality: if the Olympics were a success, they were a success primarily as the wide-scale embezzlement of public money by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), large public works companies, data collection companies, and surveillance technology distributors. If the Olympics were useful, they were useful for deepening the control of the public, increasing profits, and burnishing the image of corporate sponsors. If the Olympics were useful, they were useful for advancing the ideology of competition everywhere.
The bill to be paid is considerable. We still don’t know the exact figure, and it’s a safe bet that the Paris 2024 organizers will persist in trying to hide it, but the lowest estimates point to a public expenditure of at least 10 billion euros, at least three times the initial estimated budget. The economic fallout is uncertain to say the least and even the most ardent promoters of the Games have begun to try to delay the moment for calculating the costs as much as possible. The carbon and broader ecological tolls will be as disastrous as they are predictable (1.58 million tons of CO2 emitted, according to Reporterre’s calculations) and the social toll is just as awful, with 12,500 precariously housed people banished in order to give Paris a postcard image that never reflected reality. Civil liberties have been widely trampled with a slew of preventive arrests, people taken into police custody, and cases of abusive repression, the victims of which include Saccage 2024 members, supporters, and journalists.
Saccage 2024 plans to take stock of the real costs of these Olympic Games, with a view to inform not only the impacted citizens and residents but also the activists who are now taking up the torch, or rather the Anti-Olympic Torch, which has traveled from Olympics to Olympics and which now heads to our Italian friends for the Milan 2026 Winter Games. Saccage 2024 will present its assessment at a public evening event in November, along with a carefully argued written report. We will provide more details as soon as possible.
The struggle continues. It has been joyful, it allowed us to bring together and meet many people, to document the challenges and the repression suffered by precarious, racialized, maligned people from the 93 (Seine-Saint-Denis) and beyond, to denounce the violence suffered by sex workers and migrants, in sum it allowed us to show how the Olympic Games are the symptom of a world that is out of breath, a world of neoliberal and authoritarian capitalism that tries to hide its brutality behind a “party” that will have solved nothing.
So we’ll see you soon to take stock of the costs together! No Olympics here, no Olympics anywhere!
Saccage 2024