Does the Olympics need Paris more than Paris needs the Olympics? It seems a fair question after Tokyo’s feel-bad Covid Games stumbled over the finish line in the summer of 2021 without spectators, without local support and, beyond the podium, without much in the way of joy.
No one had to look too far past the beach parties of Rio 2016, either, to see how Olympic infrastructure designed for international visitors displaced the city’s poor. The bulldozing of favelas in the run-up to Rio wound up galvanising an anti-Olympics movement built on mistrust of the see-no-evil International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the conviction that its talk of “Olympism” — defined as the values of excellence, respect and friendship — is as empty as the white-elephant venues so many modern games have left behind.
The IOC, an elite among elites, is guaranteed to roll on to the next city, then the next, until it runs out of them, and now it’s the willing turn of Paris, hosting for the first time since 1924, when its games were also credited with saving what was, even then, a wobbling Olympic enterprise.
The long-burning keenness of French authorities to re-embrace the Olympic spirit hasn’t exactly led to universal happiness among Parisians, but the 11th-hour tensions and hiccups are at least familiar and seemingly containable this time. Even the queasy drama of uncertain water quality is one that triathlon and marathon swimmers have had to contend with before.
The single most dramatic change since 1924 — and the reason the Olympic Games thrived in the 20th century despite its many crises — is the one that’s almost too obvious to mention: television.
For broadcasters around the world, the woes of Parisian businesses, reportedly dismayed by the sparseness of security-heightened streets, are academic by virtue of being off-camera. What matters to rights-holders is that the French get their party started, without incident, and with visuals that set the tone for viewer interest that lasts until the closing ceremony.
For Ireland, Paris 2024 is on track to be an unusually packed games, full of valiant efforts, personal bests and even medal moments courtesy of a record number of athletes, with 133 qualifiers eclipsing the 116 who represented the country in Tokyo.
That’s already a great story to tell in the centenary of our first Olympic participation as an independent nation, and, not insignificantly, it’s a story that gets to be told in a ratings-friendly time zone. That won’t be the case for Los Angeles 2028, Brisbane 2032 and perhaps not the 2036 games either.
But if peaking at the right time is the ultimate trick that athletes are always seeking to pull off, the same is true for sponsors.
The big winner here is PTSB. When the bank, then still known as Permanent TSB, announced its March 2022 deal to become the title sponsor of the Irish Olympic and Paralympic teams — a deal industry sources suggested was worth in excess of €5 million — several Irish stars were already rising. It will have seemed likely, too, that an Olympics close to home had a decent chance of capturing the public imagination. But this was just eight months after Tokyo. Nothing was guaranteed.
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Now an upswing in positive vibes, supported by the recent success of Ireland’s track athletes, is rewarding its investment. By February, PTSB — about €5 million went into that rebrand, too — had signed up no fewer than 11 athlete ambassadors across the Olympic and Paralympic teams before embarking on its pre-Olympics campaign.
Whatever the final medal tally turns out to be, the sheer breadth of the dedication on display should prove vindication not only for PTSB as the title sponsor, but for the whole raft of official partners on the Olympic Federation of Ireland’s books. Yesterday, insurer Allianz announced that it had renewed its relationship, extending it through to Los Angeles. Seems like a smart plan.
Meanwhile, advertisers have been flocking to RTÉ, which will show more than 250 hours of Paris 2024 under a sub-licensing arrangement with Eurosport owners Warner Bros Discovery, the holders of the rights to stream “every moment” of the games.
[ An Olympic orgy of cheating or something that is much more than sportOpens in new window ]
This is an expensive year for RTÉ. Expect the cost of broadcasting the Olympics to be wrapped into a relatively high “special events” tab for 2024 when its annual report is released next summer. But, for now, there is at least some money coming in, with its advertising package for key moments of Irish Olympic interest swiftly selling out. It is also trying something new by offering ad packages around highlight clips posted on X via its @RTÉsport account.
After 2024, incidentally, the broadcast rights for the four subsequent winter and summer games up to and including Brisbane fall under a joint rights deal agreed by the IOC with both the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), of which RTÉ is a member, and Warner Bros Discovery. In Ireland, this will yield improvements for RTÉ's digital rights over the course of the deal. Free-to-air Olympics coverage like this, it should be noted, can only be secured by public service broadcasters across Europe if they are adequately funded by their governments. Like medal-winning chances, such deals don’t just happen.
Look, if you want to study a group of people going around in circles only to wind up close to where they started, a fractured squad of Irish politicians arguing about the future of RTÉ funding is never going to provide the most fun option. A better one is to get sucked into Paris 2024 and hope that the sense of achievement, bravery and pride on display rubs off on the rest of us somehow.
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