When the world’s best athletes gather every four years for the Olympic Games, the same hopes, fears and dreams are carried like a relay baton. Each staging of the great sporting extravaganza is unique but the rich history of past successes, failures and controversies add incrementally to the expectation levels. Paris 2024 is no different as 10,000 athletes prepare to enthrall the watching world and the 10 million spectators who will attend 32 different sports over the next 16 days.
That is a far cry from the last staging of the games in Paris a century ago when just over 3,000 athletes participated and a newly independent Ireland competed in the Olympics for the first time. A team of 48 represented the country in 1924 compared to the 133 men and women who carry Irish aspirations over the next fortnight. The 1924 team illustrated an emerging nation eager to take its place on the world stage – this year’s Irish team represents a modern evolving country which has nurtured outstanding athletes of all backgrounds and cultures.
Despite its bloated size and cost, the Olympics still retains an appeal that no other sporting event can match. It is truly global – 184 nations are competing in Paris – and its reach on TV runs into billions. The enormous scale of the games makes it an obvious security threat and the French authorities have already had to deal with an attack on its high speed rail network. Coping with the security requirement is now as much a part of staging the Olympics as building the venues.
The Irish team, competing across 15 different sports, holds a realistic chance of a record medal haul, surpassing the six picked up in London 2012. Many of those hopes will rest on the shoulders of the 64 women competing in green, another notable contrast with 1924 when only two females were in the Irish squad. Whatever the final medal count, one certainty is that, unlike 1924, they won’t be emulating Jack B Yeats and Oliver St John Gogarty in bringing home silver and bronze for art and literature. Paris 2024 will write its own chapter of Olympic history.