At end of a day in which she confirmed her status of the greatest female distance runner ever by winning the Olympic Games marathon, Hassan, the quiet, soft-spoken Dutch runner, sent a message around the world without saying a word.

Hassan stepped atop the medal podium during the closing ceremony at Stade de France Sunday night, wearing a hijab, a traditional head covering for Muslim women banned during these Paris Games by several sports federations including the French Olympic Committee.

It was a fitting ending to a day and a Games where Hassan, 31, defied her critics and the sports conventional wisdom by running an Olympic record 2 hours, 22 minutes, 55 seconds over a historic but hilly 26.2 mile course on a scorching morning and despite having already run three previous races, more than 12 miles of running in Paris.

Hassan sprinted away from Ethiopia’s Tigst Assefa in the final 200 meters to knock 12 seconds off Ethiopian Tiki Gelana’s 12-year-old Olympic record and claim her third career gold medal, the sixth medal of her career.

“When I finished, the whole moment was a release,” Hassan said. “It is unbelievable. I have never experienced anything like that. When I finished, I couldn’t stop celebrating. I was feeling dizzy. I wanted to lie down. Then I thought, ‘I am the Olympic champion. How is this possible?’”

It is a question that has often been asked through a career in which no athlete, male or female, has come close to matching her range.

She’s made a World Championship final at 800 meters, set the world record at 10,000 meters and won Olympic gold medals at three different distances.

“It’s so amazing to do track and marathon,” said Kenya’s Hellen Obiri, the bronze medalist Sunday at 2:23.11. “So many can’t do it. But Sifan has shown the world that she can do everything. These things are impossible for me.”

Hassan was born in the Ethiopian countryside not far from the Great Rift Valley. She immigrated to the Netherlands at age 15 as a refugee in hopes of studying nursing. Her nursing career was put on hold as she emerged as a world-class middle-distance runner. She won the 2016 World Indoor 1,500.

She broke the world mile record in July 2019, running 4:12.33, and held it for another four years. Later that summer she won the 1,500 and 10,000 at the World Championships in Qatar, the only athlete, male or female, to win both races in a single Olympic Games or Worlds.

Hassan swept the 5,000 and 10,000 gold medals at the Tokyo Olympics, adding a bronze medal in the 1,500, an unprecedented triple.

“She is amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing,” said Sharon Lodeki of Kenya, the fourth-place finisher in Paris. “She’s just awesome. Who can do that? Who can come from track and win the marathon? I feel like I just want to be her.”

For Paris, Hassan turned her attention to what many in the sport were calling “the Zatopek,” sweeping the Olympic 5,000, 10,000 and marathon gold medals as Czechoslovakia’s Emil Zatopek did at the 1952 Games in Helsinki. Hassan actually said she considered running the 1,500 in Paris was eventually talked out of it by her coach.

She picked up a bronze in the 5,000 and then another in the 10,000 Friday night. But her critics – and many of her supporters – questioned how she would have anything left just 35 hours later for one of the toughest marathon courses in Olympic history on a morning when temperatures reached the upper 80s.

Even Hassan had her doubts.

“I have no words,” she said. “Every moment in the race I was regretting that I ran the 5000 meters and 10,000 meters. I was telling myself if I hadn’t done that, I would feel great today.

“From the beginning to the end, it was so hard. Every step of the way. I was thinking, ‘Why did I do that? What is wrong with me?’ If I hadn’t done it, I would feel so comfortable here.

“The moment I started to feel good at 20 (kilometers), I felt so good. Then I knew I wanted gold. But everybody else was fresh and all I was thinking was, ‘When are they going to break? They’re going to go hard, they’re going to go hard.’”

As the race headed into the final mile, four runners still battled for the lead, Ethiopian Assefa, Kenya’s Obiri and Lodeki with Hassan running behind them. Then Lodeki faded, followed by Obiri in the final 800. With about 200 remaining Hassan swung wide to pass Assefa, who scooted over, appearing to try and run the Dutch runner into the barriers. There was contact and in the NBA Hassan might have been called for a foul but an Ethiopian protest was denied.

“I feel like I am dreaming,” she said. “I only see people on the TV who are Olympic champions. The marathon is something else, you know. When you do 42 kilometers in more than two hours and 20 minutes, then every single step you feel so hard and so painful.

“When I finished, the whole moment was a release. It is unbelievable. I have never experienced anything like that. Even the other marathons I have run were not close to this.”

Hassan knew she was on TV 10 hours later at the marathon medal presentation at the closing ceremony, a decades-old Olympic tradition. Hassan’s usual preferred headwear is a baseball cap, usually worn backward, or a simple orange or blue headband. For her official Olympic ID she was photographed wearing an orange baseball cap again backwards.The ball caps and headbands had been replaced by a simple crimson hijab as IOC president Thomas Bach placed yet another gold medal around her neck.

Tom Cruise jumps into the stadium during closing ceremonies of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in Saint-Denis on Sunday, Aug. 11, 2024. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Orange County Register/ SCNG)



Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Simone Biles gives the Olympic Flag to Tom Cruise during closing ceremonies of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in Saint-Denis on Sunday, Aug. 11, 2024. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Orange County Register/ SCNG)



Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Simone Biles gives the Olympic Flag to Tom Cruise during closing ceremonies of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in Saint-Denis on Sunday, Aug. 11, 2024. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Orange County Register/ SCNG)



during closing ceremonies of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in Saint-Denis on Sunday, Aug. 11, 2024. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Orange County Register/ SCNG)



Athletes jump onto the stage during closing ceremonies of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in Saint-Denis on Sunday, Aug. 11, 2024. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Orange County Register/ SCNG)



Athletes jump onto the stage during closing ceremonies of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in Saint-Denis on Sunday, Aug. 11, 2024. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Orange County Register/ SCNG)



Athletes jump onto the stage during closing ceremonies of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in Saint-Denis on Sunday, Aug. 11, 2024. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Orange County Register/ SCNG)

SAINT-DENIS, France – In the parlance of the next Summer Olympics host city, Los Angeles’ portion of the Paris Games’ closing ceremony Sunday night was a coming attraction, a global trailer for what International Olympic Committee and local officials hope is the blockbuster hit of the summer of 2028.

“Our chance to give a glimpse to the world of what to expect in 2028,” said sports and entertainment mogul Casey Wasserman, the chairman of LA 28.

So actor Tom Cruise repelled into Stade de France to the theme of “Mission Impossible,” grabbed the Olympic flag, hopped on a motorcycle and rode off through the streets of Paris to an awaiting plane.

“I’m on my way,” Cruise said, talking on a cell phone before boarding the plane in a pre-filmed segment in which he attaches the Olympic rings to the Hollywood sign.

While Cruise’s arrival showed that Los Angeles still knows how to make an entrance it upstaged a moment that was significant in multiple ways.

When Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo presented Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, accompanied gymnast Simone Biles, the Olympic flag, the first ever such handoff between two female mayors, Los Angeles, seven years after being awarded the city’s third Olympic Games, was officially on the clock.

“It’s both symbolic and historic,” Wasserman said. “But for me and the LA 28 organization, it’s the signification that it is our turn. We are no longer on deck. We are in the batter’s box and ready to go.”

Related: Hey, wasn’t that Long Beach in Paris Olympics’ closing ceremony? It sure was

And with all the swagger of Hollywood and emboldened and inspired by the Paris Games, Wasserman and Los Angeles intend to swing for the fences.

“The opportunity to have one of the great sporting cities in the world showcase the greatest sporting event in the world and the place where the world comes to tell their stories,” Wasserman said, “we think is a really powerful opportunity.”

The Paris Olympics have both presented Los Angeles with a tough act to follow and have taken Wasserman and LA 28 off the hook.

“He doesn’t have to save the Olympic movement,” Rick Burton, a Syracuse sports marketing professor and the former chief marketing officer for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, said of Wasserman.

Paris took care of that.

The first Games not held in COVID-forced isolation since 2018, Paris rebooted – many would indeed say saved – an Olympic movement undercut by decades of corruption, sexual abuse and doping scandals, widespread criticism that the IOC in doing business with authoritarian regimes in Russia and China has prioritized its bottom line over human rights abuses, and the billions in cost overruns by host cities with a trail of white elephant venues stretching from Sydney to Athens to Sochi that became obsolete almost from the moment the Olympic flame was extinguished.

Parisian venues were sold out from track and field to gymnastics to table tennis. Paris sold an Olympic record 8.6 million tickets, generating $2.83 billion. The opening ceremony drew 28.6 million viewers across the NBC and Peacock platforms, up significantly from the 17.9 million who tuned into Tokyo’s opening night three years earlier. If the 17-day Olympics were an original series they would have been the summer’s second most-watched series, averaging 33 million viewers per day.

“The appeal of these games has been absolutely undeniable in every metric, viewership engagement, tickets,” Wasserman said, “and that provides a great deal of momentum for us as we head to Los Angeles in just four years.”

Those numbers were driven by a galaxy of generational stars. Cruise was far from the biggest superhero to land in Paris. It only seemed like Biles could leap tall buildings in a single bound on her way to winning gold medals in the all-around, vault and team competition and further cementing her as history’s greatest gymnast.

American hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone raced herself into any conversation about the greatest athletes in the world with her sixth 400-meter hurdles world record in three years.

Hometown hero Leon Marchand gave the French plenty to cheer about, capturing five swimming medals, four of them gold. Marchand won the 200 butterfly and 200 breaststroke in less than two hours, becoming the first Olympic swimmer to win two individual events on the same day since 1976.

“A full stadium every day, both morning and evening sessions, countries winning their first-ever Olympic gold medals, incredible performances, shock upsets, world and Olympic records, three marriage proposals, a couple of GOATs and a Snoop Dogg,” said Jamie Fox, director of communications for World Athletics, track and field’s global governing body, referring to the rapper ever-present on NBC.

But the real hero of these Games was Paris itself and the most iconic and historic settings and venues in Olympic history, all them anchored by the Eiffel Tower from which the five Olympic rings lit up the city each night.

“The truth north of these Olympic Games, being Games wide open,” Wasserman said, “I think really opened the eyes of the world to how spectacular the Olympics are and how successful they have been, not just in the city of Paris but for the whole world to experience. The appeal of these Games has been absolutely undeniable.”

The lesson of the Paris Olympics, he said, is to not be afraid to take chances.

Dozens of LA 28, Los Angeles city, county and state officials spent the Games shadowing Paris 2024, local and national government and law enforcement officials in preparation for the 2028 Games which open July 14.

“Bastille Day,” Wasserman said laughing.

“What I learned here and I give the French team a great deal of credit for is they were willing to do things differently and take chances and it didn’t mean they were all going to be perfect or work, although most of them did,” Wasserman said. “But they really thought outside the box, obviously starting with the opening ceremonies, which was spectacular, but in every facet of their delivery they took a step back and said how can we do things differently and do things that’s right for our city and our communities and it’s not the way that other Games have done them. They were doing it for them and I give them a lot of credit because the easy thing to do has been to do what has been done before.

“But they have taken chances and those chances have been rewarded. And they have been spectacular and I still think it’s incumbent upon us in an appropriate way for Los Angeles to think about what we can do to do things differently for our communities in our city.”

For Los Angeles that means working within a $6.8 billion budget with a $615.8 million contingency fund in case the Games are postponed or canceled, adding sports like cricket, lacrosse and flag football to Olympics that will be held almost exclusively at existing or previously planned venues and holding to what Bass vowed would be “No Cars Games,” despite the region’s lack of a mass public transportation system comparable to recent Summer Olympic hosts like Paris, Tokyo and London.

“As we’ve seen here in Paris, the Olympics are an opportunity to make transformative change,” Bass said. “It’s our top priority to ensure that the Olympic preparations benefit Angelenos for decades.”

While LA 28 will submit an updated budget to the city later this year, the organizing committee has a projected goal of generating $2.5 billion in domestic sponsorship revenue, and Wasserman has said that the 2028 Games have already attracted more contracted revenue from sponsors such as Coca Cola, Delta and Visa than the Paris Games will have in total revenue.“American sponsors are coming back in and wanting to be part of the movement,” Burton said.

In naming Los Angeles host of the 2028 Games in September 2017 as part of an unprecedented double award in which Paris received the 2024 event, the IOC agreed to pay LA 2028 at least $2 billion, up from $1.7 billion had the city hosted the 2024 Games and the largest payout ever to an Olympic host city.

As part of that agreement, the IOC paid LA 28 $180 million up front in 20 quarterly $9 million payments starting on January 1, 2018.”We feel very good about where we are today,” Wasserman said. “And it’s our job to stay really diligent.”

Longtime Olympic observers and sports economists are optimistic that LA 28 will stay within its budget.

“There’s a potential problem of mission creep, that’s the military version of it, or the upgrades creep,” said Victor Matheson, a Holy Cross economics professor who has written extensively on Olympic finances.

“That’s the concern and we’re hoping that LA stays with its good reputation of having actual competent and rational people running the Games like Ueberroth did back in the old days,” Matheson continued, referring to Peter Ueberroth, chairman of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic organizing committee. “The initial numbers look pretty good but again, just like in Paris, what remains to be seen is do those good numbers finally hold up when the final books are closed?

“At least they’ve got a shot. You don’t have anybody over there saying, ‘Oh, you know what would be really cool is a permanent 80,000 stadium just for track? Don’t think that would be cool?’ We’re not even getting a hint of that.”

LA 28 has used that money to help fund a $160 million youth sports program in Los Angeles, what Wasserman calls “the single biggest investment in youth sports in the history of America in one city.”

“Your zip code is no longer a barrier to entry to participate in sports,” he said.

The federal government will pick up the cost of security, which is expected to exceed $2 billion. The Games received national special security event designation last January.

LA 28 will borrow a page from the London Games in 2012 and use local sporting events as dry runs to train both law enforcement and the military and educate the public on what to expect security-wise at the Olympics. In London’s case, they used a day at Wimbledon a year earlier for a dry run for security and the public.

“So just to be ready we could take a Dodgers game and enact on a Thursday night in 2027 and tell people what it’s going to be like so that we can practice,” Wasserman said, “They can practice and we can learn.”

The 2028 Games will only be accessible by public transportation. While the region continues to expand its public transportation lines and hubs, Bass acknowledged “that’s not going to be enough. We’re going to need over 3,000 buses.”

A significant portion of those buses – and their drivers – will come from other U.S. cities. Atlanta implemented a similar program for the 1996 Games with mixed results.

Paris, following an approach taken by previous Olympic host cities, removed the homeless from the city during the Games. Bass didn’t directly answer when asked in Paris if Los Angeles would implement a similar program in 2028.

Los Angeles County reported 75,518 homeless persons in 2023, a nine percent year-over-year increase with the City of Los Angeles reporting 46,210 homeless, a 10 percent increase, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Security Authority.

“We are going to get Angelenos housed,” Bass said. “That is what we have been doing and we’re going to continue to do that. We will get people housing, we will get them off the street. We will get them into temporary housing, address the reasons why they are unhoused and get them into permanent housing.”

“The day after the Olympics and everybody is back in town and they roll up their sleeves it’s going to be about is A) Is there anything to be gleaned from Paris and then B), Let’s go,” said David M. Carter, a sports marketing professor at USC’s Marshall School of business and founder of the Sports Business Group, a sports and entertainment consulting firm. “We need to start hiring. We need to start getting these Games in the right position and I think they’ve got a lot of this at the gate.

“The day afterwards is where they’ve been at for years, it’s just that it’s going to go from a jog to a sprint.”

Wasserman said he is ready.

“So we’ve learned a lot here,” he said Saturday. “We are focused on the road ahead. It’s about 14,135 days to the opening ceremonies. But who’s counting?”

IT'S A BIRD. IT'S A PLANE. IT'S TOM CRUISE! #ParisOlympics | #ClosingCeremony pic.twitter.com/5v4j8pOwBF

— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) August 11, 2024

Only this wasn’t Paris Fashion Week but the opening day of the Olympic Games women’s gymnastics competition.

“It is important always to have really original talent,” Wintour once said. She was talking about designers, but she could have just as easily been speaking of Simone Biles, the most original and transformative talent the sport of gymnastics has ever seen.

Wintour is expected to be among the who’s who of Oscar winners and nominees, Grammy winners, super models and heads of state at the Bercy Arena Tuesday on a night the sport has waited three years to watch Biles and the U.S. attempt to reclaim the Olympic team gold medal.

And an audience that is expected to include Tom Cruise, John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, will see Biles in all four acts of Tuesday’s epic.

While there was speculation that Team USA might hold Biles, the 27-year-old four-time Olympic and 23-time World champion, out of one of the four rotations Tuesday after she limped through parts of Saturday’s opening round after straining a calf muscle in training, USA Gymnastics confirmed that she will compete in all four events in the team final.

Jordan Chiles, Biles’ training partner and one of four returning members of Team USA’s silver medal squad at the 2021 Olympic Games in Tokyo, will start the Americans off on the vault, followed by Jade Carey, the Olympic floor exercise champion three years ago, and Biles. Chiles and Biles will set up reigning Olympic champion Suni Lee on the uneven bars. Biles will anchor the U.S. on the final two rotations, the balance beam and floor exercise. Chiles is scheduled to lead off on the beam followed by Lee with the pair switching the order on the floor.

“She’s bringing the sport to a whole new level,” Sanne Wevers, the 2016 Olympic beam gold medalist for Netherlands, said of the 2016 Olympic all-around champion. “It’s not just the level (of skills) she shows, but also the awareness she brings about things like mental health. That makes the sport even better.”

Despite the sore calf, Biles became the first female gymnast to successfully land–or even attempt – a Yurchenko double pike vault also known as the Biles 2.0. Her 59.566 all-around score was the highest among all of Saturday’s qualifying sub-divisions.

“It was pretty amazing – 59.5(66), four for four, not perfect,” said Team USA coach Cecile Landi, who also coaches Biles at World Champion Centre in Spring, Texas. “So she can improve even.”

Improvement has been a recurring theme within a Team USA determined to erase the bitter memory of a controversial silver medal finish in Tokyo.

Biles withdrew from the remainder of a team competition in which the U.S. finished second to Russia as well as the individual all-around, vault, uneven bars and floor exercise finals.

“This is definitely our redemption tour,” Biles said. “We all have more to give and our Tokyo performance wasn’t the best. We weren’t under the best circumstances either, but I feel like we have a lot of weight on our shoulders to go out there and prove we’re better athletes, we’re more mature. We’re smarter, more consistent.”

At 3 a.m. MDT video boards will light up in plenty of time to broadcast Salt Lake City officials’ final presentation to the International Olympic Committee in Paris at 3:30 a.m.

By 4 a.m. Salt Lake is expected to be formally named host of the 2034 Winter Olympic Games.

Then, Salt Lake City mayor Erin Mendenhall said, the city “is going to party like it’s 2002.”

The celebration won’t just be in Utah.

The IOC announcement will also formalize what U.S. Olympic leaders are calling the “American decade” in which Los Angeles will host the 2028 Summer Games and Salt Lake City the 2034 Winter Olympics, creating a unique opportunity to raise the profile of Olympic sports with the American public, especially younger generations, and corporate sponsors.

“This is in my mind a golden age of sport in the U.S. to raise the relevancy, the profile and the opportunities to participate” said Catherine Raney Norman, chairperson of the Salt Lake City Olympic bid who also competed in four Olympic Games as a speed skater. “And it’s incumbent on us as leaders to make sure we capitalize on that and not miss that window of opportunity.”

It will be the first time the same country has held two Games within a six-year window since the Atlanta held the 1996 Summer Games and Utah the 2002 Winter Olympics.

‘We are affectionately calling it, this is ‘The Decade.’ This very well may be the single most important decade in sport in this country,’ USOPC CEO Sarah Hirshland said. “And we see a massive obligation and an incredible opportunity for us to showcase, not a single sport, not two sports, but the breadth of sport and what it stands for.

“And what it represents and what an important part of society it can be in the development of humans and in the development of communities.”

It is a decade that will further highlight Los Angeles’ status as a destination for major sporting events. In the 10 years leading up to Los Angeles’ third Olympic Games, the region will have hosted two Super Bowls, 2022 and 2027, and the 2026 World Cup.

“Look, I’m more excited about the Los Angeles decade which culminates in LA 2028,” said Casey Wasserman, chairman of LA 28, the local Olympic organizing committee. “Not that I’m not excited about the opportunity for Salt Lake. But you know, you look at the city I live in, the city I, the reason I’m doing this is because LA and if you think about the things that will have happened in the 10 years previous and leading up to, you know, obviously multiple Super Bowls, World Cups, all the way up to the Olympics, and a stunning array of other events here, all-star games and the like, I think in many ways this is the Los Angeles decade.”

For the IOC, the American decade represents six years of safe harbor after a series of Games marred by billions in cost overruns, corruption scandals, and widespread criticism over doing business with authoritarian regimes in Russia and China and prioritizing the bottom line or human rights abuses.

Six of the last 10 Summer and Winter Olympics held in non-authoritarian nations, six have finished in the red with a combined deficit of $4.9 billion. A seventh Games, the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, reportedly broke even.

The last seven Games have averaged 158.7 percent overrun from their original budget, according to an Oxford University study earlier this year.

“What I hear at the IOC level is there’s a flight to safety,” said David M. Carter, a sports marketing professor at USC’s Marshall School of business and founder of the Sports Business Group, a sports and entertainment consulting firm. “They know they need Games that will be run well, will be well regarded, that have the ability to generate tremendous revenue and show well on a global stage. They’ve taken risks and we don’t need to read off the list from Sochi to Rio to Beijing and Tokyo, They’ve taken a fair amount of global risks at a time when a lot of international cities are not as inclined to bid and you have a decade in which you would have, you have LA and Salt Lake City that’s certainly going to help them with their re-boot and part of that relevance we’ve seen is the new sports they’re being involved to be younger and hipper.

“They call it the American decade but what I think it’s really about is taking the proverbial safety and making sure you have a couple of Games that are highly unlikely compared to other bid cities to have major problems.”

There are already signs that the American decade has been welcomed on Madison Avenue.

LA 28 has a projected goal of generating $2.5 billion in domestic sponsorship revenue, and Wasserman has said that the 2028 Games have already attracted more contracted revenue than the Paris Games will have in total revenue.

“American sponsors coming back in and wanting to be part of the movement,” said Rick Burton, a Syracuse sports marketing professor and the former chief marketing officer for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee.

“We’re a pretty good media market so to have these two bites of the apple as it were is exciting at the level you can think the business side of the Olympics should be pretty excited.”

Two games in the U.S. where they’re going to have pretty strong control over things. When games are overseas that facilitation that big corporations like to have. That kind of presence can’t be understated when you have games in LA and Salt Lake and so you would look at certain brands say, ‘Ok, we know how to do that U.S. really well. We sometimes struggle in other countries.’ This is where America is both a plus and a negative. This is as American as you can get and we’re going to be there.’”

But economists and Olympic historians also caution that the success of the American decade isn’t a given.

“It’s certainly an interesting term to use because it assumes, a couple of things. One of them that the games will be successful and America will benefit,” said Robert Baade, a Lake Forest College economics professor who has written extensively on business side of the Olympics. “And when you think about the United States relative to other countries, the thing with the U.S. is the U.S. has often been referred to as hosting the business games, their motivation is to not bring the world together but to line their own pockets. And so when you used the term the American decade, I’m not sure exactly if that’s an appropriate term. What it does (suggest) is that the United States in some way has been distinguished through the awarding of two games within a 10 year period. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing depends on the games’ outcome.

“I think what does that mean exactly? Is that part of the hyperbole that we often associate with the games or will it truly be something that’s favorable and beneficial to the US. We’ll see.

“American decade? Yeah, if it really does result in some real benefit to the U.S. and I’m not sure we can automatically draw that conclusion. So we’ll see.”

Raney Norman recalled some recent advice Sen. Mitt Romney gave her. Romney rescued the scandal ridden 2002 Games that were projected a $379 million budget shortfall but ended up reporting a $100 million surplus.

“Ten years are going to go by quickly,” she recalled Romney saying. “Maintaining that support and excitement it’s incumbent for us to continue to do that and not take it for granted.”

“A little audacious,” a member of the French delegation said of Macron’s entrance to Le Monde.

But Macron, then 39 and the youngest French president in history, knew his audience. IOC president Thomas Bach views himself as not just head of a worldwide sports organization, but also a major global geopolitical player. And so Macron, a “Paris 2024” pin attached to the lapel of his power navy blue suit, the full presidential entourage in tow, had come to the shores of Lake Geneva to kiss the five rings.

Macron hit all the right talking points, extolling the “values ​​of peace, freedom, tolerance that the Olympic movement illustrates, embodies so wonderfully.”

“That is what I came to defend,” he pronounced.

He was an attentive listener as Bach led him on a tour of the Olympic Museum at the end of which a charmed Bach declared, “The Paris 2024 bid is underway.” Never mind that Paris’ bid to host a third Games had been officially launched two years earlier.

At one point Macron and Bach posed for photographers, shaking hands next to an eternal flame with a statue of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the Frenchman who founded the modern Olympics, looming behind them.

“I have come to support a candidacy built with great ardor,” Macron said.

As the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad formally began Friday with an opening ceremony on the Seine, a major question mark hovers over the IOC after a decade of controversial and scandal-ridden Games: Can the 19-day competition and Games Macron has tied himself so closely to revive passion for the Olympic movement with the public, potential corporate sponsors and future bid cities?

Can Paris deliver on the ardor, the enthusiasm Macron promised that day in Lausanne and provide a springboard to the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles? Or will the Olympic flag Mayor Karen Bass brings back to Los Angeles on Aug. 12 represent a further diminished Games?

“It is really clear and the IOC has been looking to really reboot the Olympics and using Paris and Los Angeles to redeliver some real relevance,” said David M. Carter, a sports marketing professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business and founder of the Sports Business Group, a sports and entertainment consulting firm. “So I think appropriately there’s been a lot of emphasis on the ability of Paris to pull off these Games and really for a variety of reasons, like the postponements from COVID, the revenues really haven’t been where they need to be. Clearly the number of cities that have wanted to bid on the Games over the past decade has dropped while expenses have gone up, politics have prevailed. It’s really important that they pull off these safe and revenue producing Games. Not necessarily profitable but at least not take a huge loss when they pull it off.”The reboot, it’s making them must-see television, it’s making them financially feasible.”

Full of star power

The Paris Games, the first Olympics held outside a COVID-related lockdown since 2018, certainly won’t lack for star power.

There will be once in a generation — maybe once in a lifetime — talents. American hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone might be the greatest athlete on the planet. Period. The 24-year-old has a range that track and field has never seen. She would be a gold medal contender at 200 and 400 meters, a medal threat in the 100 meter hurdles and the 800. In Paris she will focus on defending her 400 hurdles Olympic gold medal and continuing to take the world record to places once considered unimaginable. McLaughlin-Levrone broke the 52 and 51 second barriers and her most recent world record, 50.65 at last month’s Olympic Trials, her fifth world record in three years, suggests another barrier could be broken.

“She can run 49,” Dalilah Muhammad, the 2016 Olympic 400 hurdles champion, said.

Simone Biles, the most transcendent Olympic athlete of her generation, returns to the Games to reclaim the individual all-around title after a gymnastics version of vertigo known as “The Twisties” prevented her from doing so in Tokyo.

There will be historic quests. Kenya’s Eliud Kipchoge is attempting to be the first person to win three consecutive Olympic marathon titles. U.S. swimmer Katie Ledecky looks to add to her seven Olympic gold medals, already equal to most ever by a female swimmer.

And there are local heroes. France’s Leon Marchand, a five-time NCAA champion at Arizona State, swept the 200 and 400 medley titles at the last two World Championships adding a 200 butterfly gold at last summer’s Worlds. Victor Wembanyama, the NBA rookie of the year, is a big reason why the prospect of a France vs. Team USA gold medal showdown has made the basketball final the most sought-after competition ticket of the Games.

But some of the biggest stars of these postcard Olympics will be the venues themselves.

“History dripping from the setting,” said Rick Burton, a Syracuse sports marketing professor and the former chief marketing officer for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee.

Beach volleyball will be played against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower, fencing will take center stage at the Grand Palais, the Trocadero will anchor road cycling. Equestrian events will be at the Chateau de Versailles. The marathon course starts at the Hotel de Ville, turns for home around the Versailles palace and finishes near the Esplande de Ivalides. Most dramatic of all will be the opening ceremony featuring a flotilla of boats carrying athletes westward along the Seine at sunset.

A “moment of beauty, art, celebration of sports and our values,” Macron said.

“So many places and moments that combine the history of France (the role of Paris as a capital, the monarchy and Louis XIV, the modern Paris of the Belle Époque, that of Pierre de Coubertin) and the history of sport,” Paul Dietschy, professor of contemporary history at the University of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, said in an email. “If all goes well, these will be aesthetic Games.”

Burton said his hope is “Paris will prove and set the table marvelously for LA in that Paris will give us the historic Games and not only of (1900 and 1924 Paris Olympics) but also Paris being a world capitol of the last 500 years. And then four years later you will go to Los Angeles and it will be Hollywood and technology and it will be this wonderful build out on everything I think Paris will deliver on in ’24 and allow (LA 28 chairman) Casey (Wasserman) and the group that is building 2028 to say, ‘OK, they killed it with history and grandeur of a European capital and we’re going to kill it now with the things that we’re good at.’”

The Paris and Los Angeles connection

Paris and Los Angeles were awarded the 2024 and 2028 Games in 2017 at a time when the IOC was in “a total (full)-blown crisis that no one, or fewer and fewer cities and countries and populations want the Olympic Games,” said John J. MacAloon, a University of Chicago professor who has written extensively on the Olympic movement and was a member of the 2000 IOC commission that reformed the bidding process.

Despite Bach’s tongue-in-cheek comments about the launching of the Paris bid, Macron arrived in Lausanne knowing that Paris was a lock to host the 2024 Games or at the very least the 2028 event after the IOC executive board a month approved a month earlier the unprecedented move of awarding of the next two available Summer Games at the same time with Paris and Los Angeles the only two cities still standing after a bid process in which bankrolling the Olympics was repeatedly rejected by voters and local governments across Europe and North America.

Eight cities had pulled out of bids for the previous two available Olympic Games with no viable host city candidate for the 2028 Games appearing on the horizon. Four cities — Boston, Rome, Budapest and Hamburg — pulled out of the 2024 bidding with Toronto officials deciding against even entering the race.

“Everyone was scared off,” said Victor A. Matheson, a Holy Cross economics professor who specializes in the economic impact on sports. “That’s the great story with Paris and LA. After all the bidders dropped out, especially the ones where any voters were involved. Because voters love the Olympics but they hate paying for them. We had Boston drop out which is how LA got the U.S. bid. We had Hamburg, Munich on the winter side, all these winter and summer hosts drop out and, of course, it comes time to award the Games to France, comes down to LA and Paris and they gave it to Paris but they were worried they wouldn’t get anyone for 2028. So they said, ‘Is there any way we can give you 2028 right now?’

“And so LA won the 2028 Olympics without there actually being a bidding process for 2028. I mean that’s enough right there. Again not a gigantic competitive bidding process for Brisbane in 2032 and the last two Winter Games that they’ve just announced is the same sort of deal. They didn’t say hey, let’s do a cattle call, let’s do it like the opening of Walmart on Friday morning, Black Friday and all the customers storm into the building with chaos of multiple bidders and everyone trying to outbid one another. They didn’t have that.”

Potential bid cities haven’t been the only ones skeptical. McDonald’s, for decades one of the IOC’s top sponsors, decided not to renew its deal with the IOC after the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro. Toyota announced that it will not renew its sponsorship with the IOC worth a reported $835 million after the agreement expires later this year. According to a Japanese news agency, Toyota officials said the money was “not used effectively to support athletes and promote sport.”

By awarding Paris and Los Angeles the 2024 and 2028 Games at the same time, MacAloon said, bought the IOC “time that it desperately needs to rethink the whole situation.”

The challenge of breaking even

While Sochi and Beijing reported revenues of $53.15 billion and $52 billion for the government subsidized 2014 and 2022 Winter Olympics, respectively, of the last 10 Summer and Winter Olympics held in non-authoritarian nations, six have finished in the red with a combined deficit of $4.9 billion. A seventh Games, the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, reportedly broke even.

The last seven Games have averaged 158.7 percent overrun from their original budget, according to an Oxford University study earlier this year.

“You think about Sochi through Beijing and Tokyo there were a lot of issues there,” Carter said. “I think a big part of it is the political element of it and I think it’s really hard to compare one Olympic Games to another because when you talk about the Games in Russia or China it’s really about the global positioning of the political brand as much as it is the financial responsibility attached to hosting the Games. They’ll host at any cost because they’re looking at it as a marketing expense for their country. Whereas Paris and LA are looking at it and putting pencil to paper and making sure these are vibrant Games and people want to watch and attend and sponsors want to invest in and advertisers want to be a part of. But you have to do it with some measure of fiscal responsibility, so it’s really hard to compare one games to the next.

“One way to look at it is these will be the first games in a long time where there won’t be an asterisk next to it saying delayed, postponed, geopolitical concerns, whatever it might be. It’s a sort of back to the way you used to think about the Olympics from a business standpoint, which is this exercise in following the money. And that money is flowing from, when we think about Paris and LA, really coming in from your broadcast partners and your corporate sponsors. And if you look at the IOC level, you’ve got so much of that money coming from those two buckets that it’s really pretty amazing. And that amount of money is not going to go down. Look at all the controversy we’ve had and yet the revenue from the broadcast and sponsorship continues to grow. I think to LA, if you look at the LA 28 budget, you’re still looking at 65 percent of it coming from sponsorship and ticket sales. So for LA to be successful, and this is why we see LA 28 focus, not solely, but in large measure, in getting the sponsorship pieces in place. And it is not going to be the case with Paris or LA that you can simply say, ‘Well we came up deeply in the red but that’s OK because we built our brand for LA and Paris, two countries that don’t need major events to drive tourism or notoriety.”

The latest reported costs for the Paris Games are at $9.7 billion, less than any of the previous four Olympic Games, summer or winter. French taxpayers are projected to pick up between $3.26 and $5.44 billion of those costs, according to French national audit officials.

Besides security, one of the biggest items in the Paris budget was a $1.5 billion multi-year cleanup of the Seine, polluted for decades by the flow of industrial waste and sewage.

“Everyone has been conscious of every euro that is spent, that it is useful, and we should be careful not to spend any euros on things that are superficial,” Etienne Thobois, the CEO of the Paris 2024 organizing committee, recently told reporters. “Frankly, that is a challenge in itself.

“The target (around making a profit) is always to be balanced. We’ve always said we will spend only what we can generate in terms of revenue. The target is not to make money. The target is just to deliver a spectacular Games and to do it on a balanced budget. That’s the aim.”

It’s a target future potential bid cities and corporate sponsors as well as sports economists will be keeping an eye on.

“Top of the radar is the final bottom line number on how much spending they engage,” Matheson said. “It’s looking like they’ll keep it under $10 billion and that’s the first time that’s happened in like two decades.

“If they’re at like $8.5 billion right now and the final number comes in at $11 (billion), that’s not great because that’s like everything was going fine and then it got away from us at the end. On the other hand, if it really does come in under $10 (billion), that’s looking pretty good for LA in four years. Because LA might even be able to come in under what Paris is doing.”

Paris’ bottom line will be helped by the selling of an Olympic record 8.6 million tickets generating $2.83 billion.

Will Parisians embrace it?

But success at the box office is not necessarily an accurate reflection of a Parisian’s view of the Games.

“Since the 2024 Games were awarded to Paris, France has had a problem because it doesn’t know how to ‘sell’ the Games to its population,” said David Roizen, a specialist in sport public policy and the Olympics at Fondation Jean-Jaures, a French think tank aligned with the Socialist Party. “In fact, it is not in control of its ‘narrative,’ it is subject to media events: the price of tickets, transport problems, pollution of the Seine.

“This situation has not contributed to making the Games popular. Opinion polls attest to this. However, since the arrival of the Olympic flame in Marseille at the beginning of May, something was beginning to happen in France. Local populations were out in force, celebrating the passage of this Olympic symbol close to home.

“With the shock of the dissolution, Emmanuel Macron broke all that.”

On June 9, Macron dissolved the National Assembly triggering a nationwide snap election, the first round on June 30, the second round July 7.

“Why ruin this beautiful moment?” Anne Hidalgo, Paris’ socialist mayor said.

Hidalgo said Macron’s decision was “another move I am having difficulty understanding.

“Like a lot of people, I was stunned to hear the president decide to do a dissolution. A dissolution just before the Games, it’s really something that is extremely unsettling.”

Hidalgo wasn’t alone.

“Our country is facing an unprecedented political situation and is getting ready to host the world in a few weeks,” Gabriel Attal, the country’s prime minister and like Macron a member of the Renaissance Party, told reporters.

Anxiety was further heightened when National Rally (RN), the far-right nationalist, anti-immigration party led by Marine LePen, won 33.2 percent of the vote in the first round with a pro-Macron coalition finishing third with 21.2 percent.

“In fact, the fear of a far-right government in France swept through all the news, including Paris 2024,” Roizen said.

But in the second round, France’s left-wing parties denied RN a majority in the Parliament’s lower house.

“It is clear that he has made a political error firstly towards his voters, who considered it an irresponsible act,” Dietschy said. “He is no doubt relieved because the Macronist vote has not collapsed, the RN came third and the left-wing coalition is very divided. It will be very difficult to govern France and in the history of cohabitations, it is always the president who has benefited even if he cannot stand for re-election in 2027. It’s clear that since the European elections, the attention paid to sport, i.e. the Olympic Games, but also the Euro, has dropped considerably.

“But now that the situation has calmed down and we’ve entered the holiday period, interest in the Games is returning. Paris broke the Atlanta 1996 record for ticket sales. In fact, it seems to me that the serious business will begin after the Games, when a new government will really be in place, as well as the National Assembly.”

Said Roizen, “Now that the threat has disappeared and the event is approaching, Paris 2024 is once again the main topic, between the anticipation of the competition and the inconvenience of everyday life.”

Not that there aren’t other concerns.

“The first thing is safety. In this period of global unrest, safety is the first condition for the athletes to succeed in their performances,” Roizen said. “Everything has been done, and the State is mobilized as never before, but zero risk is not possible.”

France has been the target of a series of terrorist attacks over the past decade including the November 2015 coordinated Islamic terrorist attacks that killed 130 in Paris and Saint-Denis, a northern suburb and the site of the Stade de France and other Olympic venues.

Paris has enlisted 22,000 private security officers and 45,000 soldiers and police officers to protect the 11,215 athletes and 15 million visitors. Officials have reduced the number of spectators for the opening ceremony from 600,000 to 320,000 and restricted access to the river and streets leading to other Olympic venues. French sports minister Amelie Oudea-Castera said the final cost of Olympic security has not yet been determined.

Hidalgo had hoped to demonstrate the cleanliness of the Seine after a nine-year clean-up plan by swimming in it on June 23 only the have the event postponed when rains raised both the river’s water and bacteria levels. The mayor’s swim was rescheduled for June 30 but was then pushed back because of the first round of the snap election.

Hidalgo finally got to take the plunge on Wednesday, pronouncing the Seine “exquisite.”

“The water is very, very good,” the mayor said. “A little cool, but not so bad.’’

Still local, IOC and international sports officials remain concerned that heavy rains could once again raise bacteria in the river to unsafe levels jeopardizing the marathon swimming and triathlon competitions scheduled to take place in the Seine.

The swimming competition at the first Paris Olympics in 1900 was held in the Seine, with athletes producing a series of record-shattering times, aided by swimming with the current. Concerns over performance enhancement cast a shadow over the swimming competition at these Games as well.

Eleven out of the 31 swimmers on China’s Olympic team tested positive for a banned heart drug in 2021. The 11 were among 23 swimmers who tested positive for the drug trimetazidine, known as TMZ, only to be privately cleared by World Anti-Doping Agency, a decision that allowed Chinese swimmers to compete at the Tokyo Olympic Games. Among those cleared were Zhang Yufei, who won gold medals in the women’s 200-meter butterfly and 200-meter freestyle relay in Tokyo, and Wang Shun, gold medalist in the men’s 200-meter individual medley. Both will compete in Paris.

Chinese officials said that the positive drug test was caused by the 23 athletes accidentally eating food contaminated with “very low levels” of TMZ. WADA accepted China’s explanation.But both Chinese swimming and Olympic officials and WADA have come under widespread international criticism after the positive tests and WADA’s decision were made public earlier this year.

Michael Phelps, the most decorated athlete in Olympic history, questioned the credibility of WADA during Congressional hearings last month and said the Chinese doping scandal posed a threat to the Games themselves.

“If we continue to let this slide any farther, the Olympic games might not even be there,” Phelps said.

“Right now people are just getting away with everything. How is that possible? It makes no sense. I’m one [who believes] if someone does test positive, I’d like to see a lifetime ban.”

Russia was banned from the 2021 Games after the country’s state sponsored doping program was exposed. More than 300 Russian athletes still competed in Tokyo under the flag of the Russian Olympic Committee, winning 71 medals.

Russia and Belarus are banned from Paris as the result of the Putin regime’s invasion of Ukraine. “No flag, anthem, colors or any other identifications whatsoever of Russia or Belarus will be displayed at the Olympic Games Paris 2024 in any official venue or any official function,” according to the IOC, but at least 36 Russian and Belarussian athletes have accepted invitations to compete as individual neutral athletes in Paris.

Heat will also be a major concern in Paris. In 2022, during a time period similar to this year’s Olympic window, temperatures hit 96 degrees.

“For athletes, smaller performance-impacting issues like sleep disruption and last minute changes to event timings, to exacerbated health impacts and heat related stress and injury, the consequences can be varied and wide-ranging. Whilst global temperatures are continuing to rise, climate change should increasingly be viewed as an existential threat to sport,” Sebastian Coe, president of World Athletics, track and field’s global governing body, wrote in the forward of “Rings of Fire: Heat Risks At The 2024 Paris Olympics,” a University of Portsmouth climate report released last month.

Coe, a two-time Olympic 1,500 meter champion for Great Britain, was chairman of the local organizing committee for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, viewed by many as the last great Games.

The question, Matheson said, is “whether the luster is off the games with the citizenry. What we’ve seen for most of the 20th and 21st century is people have griped here and there about the costs for good reason. The London Games ended up costing three or four times what they were budgeted as, but people had a good time. So even say look these things are not making us rich, as a matter of fact, it’s the opposite, but they are making us happy. London had very fun events. That probably was the case in either Tokyo or Brazil that we had any feel-good effect at all. And you wonder whether these events, it’s not going to make you rich, but it might make you happy. That wasn’t happening the last couple of events.

“I’m interested to see how the event is embraced by Parisians. It is a fun event, but it’s an expensive event and it’s a hassle.

“And the question is have the Olympics gotten to a point where it’s more of a hassle than it is fun in which case these things make you poor and they make you unhappy which is the worst, the worst of all worlds and you wonder if the Olympics will ever grab back that joy that both they and the World Cup have had and generated.”