Why would any city in its right mind want to host the Olympic Games? They’re ridiculously expensive, hugely inconvenient and an enormous distraction from so many other vital municipal issues. Not to mention the vastly increased threat to its citizens from a terrorist attack that must be correspondingly met with highly invasive security measures.
And yet, there seems to be no shortage of cities anxious to bid for the right to hold them. Toronto, where I grew up, tried several times to host the Olympics, all without success. The city was broadly considered to be a frontrunner for the 1996 Games, only to be pipped at the post by Atlanta and its nefarious corporate influencers led by CNN and Coca Cola, while its 2008 bid was significantly outdistanced by the political momentum behind the Beijing juggernaut. Or so we were told.
But as we licked our wounded pride, the thing lost on most of us was that Toronto was always a terrible choice for the Olympic Games, because it conspicuously lacked the one thing that any successful city needs: effective public infrastructure. And by that I don’t just mean that such infrastructure is necessary for successfully hosting the Games (although that, too, of course), but that its presence is a major factor in procuring a high quality of life for its residents.
Spending hours of your day stuck in endless lines of traffic, with nothing to do but look out your window and watch another condominium complex be slowly erected along a lakefront that city officials had long sold out to developers, is bound to put a significant dent in your lifestyle (unless, that is, you are a condo developer). But such was the reality of living in a city where the running joke was that there were only two seasons on offer: winter and construction.
And one of the things about efficient transportation infrastructure is that it’s intimately tied to our geographical understanding of what a modern city is, enabling forward-thinking urban regions to smoothly grow and incorporate many surrounding points of light that would otherwise remain unconnected. Or not, as the case may be.
Years ago, when I ran a theoretical physics institute in the nearby university town of Waterloo, I would routinely tell prospective recruits that we were located only just an hour away from the nation’s largest city.
But that was a lie: the institute was only an hour away from Toronto if you left at 2 in the morning. And had a car. And it naturally didn’t take long for people to figure that out, which hardly made recruitment any easier.
For all of its overriding importance, however, transportation infrastructure (just like university research, as it happens) rarely stirs hearts, minds or voting intentions, and is thus largely ignored by the political powers that be. But while constantly sweeping much-needed infrastructural concerns under the rug might well be a successful election strategy, the longer we wait to actually address them, the less likely it will be that anything meaningful will get done.
In fact, major international multi-sport competitions like the Olympics present one of the very few occasions when the lagging state of essential public infrastructure is finally given the attention it deserves, with competing cities suddenly promising a slate of long-overdue improvements in order to strengthen their bid: a rail link to the Toronto airport, for example, was only opened in 2015, a month before it hosted the Pan American Games.
Well, that’s the usual state of affairs at least. But it didn’t apply, interestingly enough, to Paris—a city which launched its massive Grand Paris infrastructure program back in 2008, roughly eight years before it submitted its 2024 Olympics bid. The Grand Paris initiative features a marked extension (now in operation) of two of the city’s 16 metro lines, together with the construction of a whopping 4 additional lines to cover the Parisian environs, incorporating 200 km of track and 68 new stations, all of which are due to come online over the next decade or so.
That is hugely impressive. But that’s just the beginning of the story. Because it turns out that a key benefit of getting one’s basic infrastructural house in order is that city officials then have the chance to think deeply about how they might even more progressively shape the landscape, so that when a major catalyzing event like the Olympics comes along, they can fully leverage it to turn their bold ideas into reality.
Which is precisely what happened in Paris.
These Games, unlike any others previously held, point solidly towards the future: tangibly demonstrating what a modern urban environment can be, from an emphatic public reclamation of a vital waterway to stunning refurbishments of dozens of major historical landmarks, to an extended real-time network from Versailles to Marseille to Tahiti, with consequent benefits to the entire nation lasting far beyond this frenetic summer.
Paris 2024, in short, is not just a big party—although it will hopefully be that too if the security forces successfully manage to do their Herculean jobs—it represents nothing short of an exhilarating environmental and civic exemplar for the entire world.
It’s not often that I get teary-eyed by the French these days (as you might have noticed), but this is definitely one of those times. Somehow, seemingly out of nowhere, the entire country has spectacularly risen to the challenge and created something innovative, inspiring and important.
Vive la France.
Howard Burton, July 25, 2024
Howard is a filmmaker and author of six books. His book First Principles: Building Perimeter Institute tells the remarkable and unconventional story of the founding of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Foreword by Nobel Laureate Sir Roger Penrose.
He is the Director of Pandemic Perspectives (2022), Through the Mirror of Chess: A Cultural Exploration (2023), Raphael: A Portrait (2024) and Botticelli’s Primavera (2025) which is the first film in our Renaissance Masterpieces Series.
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