Paris 2024 organisers pledge 'new model' for Olympics

By Sports Desk August 09, 2021

As the Tokyo Olympics bade farewell Sunday a year later than planned, organisers of the 2024 Paris Games looked forward to welcoming the world to France in three years. 

Paris 2024 chief Tony Estanguet, a three-time gold medallist in canoe slalom, praised everyone involved with the Tokyo Games for managing to hold the event amid a global pandemic. 

As the Olympic flag was passed from Tokyo to Paris on Sunday, though, Estanguet talked up his team's plans to host their first Summer Games since 1924.

"We waited an extra year for this moment, but we are already waiting 100 years to bring the Olympic flag back to Paris, so the excitement is very strong in our team and back home in France,” Estanguet said.

The Paris bid, awarded in 2017, features venues familiar to any tourist, with competitions to be held at the Place de la Concorde, Champs de Mars, Les Invalides and the Palace of Versailles, among other high-profile spots.

"Every host city must bring something new and contribute to the evolution of the Games," Estanguet said. 

"With Paris 2024, our ambition is to offer a new model to open the Games to more people. This starts with offering the Games to the city.

"Our plan is based on taking sport out of its traditional spaces and putting competitions at the heart of the city, in front of the most famous Parisian landmarks; the Eiffel Tower for beach volleyball, wrestling and judo, and equestrian at the Chateau de Versailles.

"The ambition is simple: invite the world, including the hundreds of millions of viewers, into the very heart of Paris.”

Thanks to that one-year delay, the welcome will occur relatively quickly. On July 26, 2024, Paris will take centre stage. 

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    "No athlete should be prevented from competing just because of their passport," the organisation's executive board said.

    "[They would be] neutral athletes and in no way represent their state or any other organisation in their country.

    “No flag, anthem, colours or any other identifications whatsoever of these countries being displayed at any sports event or meeting, including the entire venue."

    The move has been met with criticism however, and comes just weeks after Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky called for athletes to remain barred.

    A joint statement from Athletes for Ukraine and athlete association Global Athlete argued any decision to relax sanctions would endorse the war in Ukraine.

    "The return of Russian and Belarusian athletes to international competition, especially the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, will see the Russian state use athletes once more to bolster the war effort," they said.

    "[This will] distract from the atrocities in Ukraine on one of the biggest multi-sport stages in the world."

    Russian athletes competed under the flag of the Russian Olympic Committee at Tokyo 2020 after the nation was officially banned following multiple doping scandals.

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    "Maybe another one [player] appears who asked me to, and it's not Pique. I'm going to keep talking to them like that. I have a conversation with someone I've known for years and I speak as I speak," Rubiales said.

    "There were more [players] who asked me. He [Pique] announced a long time ago that he did not want to return, and I spoke with Luis de la Fuente so that he would know who had called me. 

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