When the Paris Olympics kick off next month, the event will be historic. For the first time ever, a Summer Games opening ceremony will not be staged in a stadium, but instead will float on boats down the iconic River Seine. The International Olympic Committee – the Switzerland-based non-profit and self-proclaimed ‘supreme authority’ of the Olympics – is heralding the bold plan as ‘breaking new ground by bringing sports into the city’.
But on another front, the Paris Olympics are stamping on well-worn urban turf: to make way for the Olympic spectacle, French authorities are displacing poor and marginalised peoples. The Games are turbocharging gentrification in the city. In the months leading up to the Olympics, security officials have been loading migrants and the unhoused onto buses and shipping them to the French interior. In April, the largest squat in Paris – a former cement factory that housed around 400 migrants – was raided, forcing residents out into the cold.
A new report by the group Le Revers de la Médaille (The Other Side of the Medal) found an almost 39 per cent uptick in encampment evictions in the year leading up to the Paris Games. And the scale of the project is bracing: more than 12,500 people were displaced from Paris in 2023–24 alone. Le Revers de la Médaille call it ‘le nettoyage social’, or social cleansing. The French government has denied a connection between this forced displacement and the Paris Games. But as Antoine de Clerck, the campaign director for Le Revers de la Médaille, told me, ‘the intensification of the process makes it quite obvious to everyone’ that the two are linked.
The displacement and gentrification that we are witnessing in the context of the Paris Olympics are not unique to the City of Light. Host cities have a built-in incentive to expel the poor before the bright lights of the global media arrive on the scene to cover the sporting spectacle. Paul Alauzy, a spokesperson for Le Revers de la Médaille and a coordinator for Médecins du Monde, explained to CBC Radio that ‘le nettoyage social’ is part of the mega-event’s DNA, that Olympic organisers are motivated to ‘remove all the “undesirables”… to hide the poorest’ residents in the host city.
When it comes to the Games, displacement is an ignominious tradition of sorts that lurks in the shadows of Olympic history. David Goldblatt, author of The Games: A Global History of the Olympics, notes that ahead of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis detained Roma people and interned them in a prison camp, foreshadowing the grim repression and death that was to come. He also points to the 1964 Games in Tokyo, where authorities rounded up hundreds of petty criminals, evicted the homeless from local parks, and even ‘asked the yakuza gangs to send their most visible members on a long out-of-town holiday’ to sanitise the city’s image before the throngs of Olympics-goers arrived.
More recently, when Seoul hosted the 1988 Summer Olympics, a whopping 720,000 people were evicted as the military dictatorship running South Korea brutally ‘beautified’ the city ahead of the Games. Amid this intense spate of dispossession, entire neighbourhoods were razed. When residents fought back, the authorities killed them.
Ahead of the Atlanta 1996 Summer Olympics, more than 9,000 homeless residents were arrested –often without probable cause – as part of a ‘social cleansing’ programme that nabbed the attention of federal authorities who ultimately issued a cease-and-desist order. Security officials even distributed one-way bus tickets to unhoused residents, shipping them to places like Alabama and Florida. According to the Center on Housing Rights and Evictions, ‘the demonizing of poor and homeless Atlantans by the moneyed power elite did not begin with the Olympics, but hosting the 1996 Summer Olympic Games gave that practice the adrenaline it needed to become the city’s prevailing, even blatant, public policy’. Socially excluded groups like the homeless and working poor were swept aside.
As the Rio de Janeiro 2016 Summer Olympics approached, some 77,000 people were displaced to create space for Olympic venues and development. Theresa Williamson, founder of Catalytic Communities, the Rio-based NGO, told me: ‘The biggest problems with the Olympics are growing inequality, the death of culture, and the marketization of the city. They’re all related in one big process.’ Christopher Gaffney, a professor at New York University who previously worked at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Brazil, explained to me how Olympics boosters create plausible deniability by claiming that displacement is unrelated to the Olympics when in reality ‘the demands of the Games required a reorganization’ of the city and ‘those in the way of that organization, because of the Games, were displaced’. This, he added, ‘is another part of the Olympic and host city shell game where nobody takes responsibility’ and ‘there are precious few controls on’ Games-induced displacement. Today this ‘shell game’ is unfolding in Paris.
The Paris 2024 opening ceremony might still be brought indoors, should security concerns require it, but those living outdoors do not enjoy such contingency plans. The Olympics provide a handy alibi to mistreat the most marginalised members of society in the name of profit and spectacle. We would do well to keep this Olympic underbelly in mind as we watch the world’s greatest athletes convene in France to participate in the Paris 2024 Games. We need not succumb to oversimplified thinking: we can both cheer on the athletes who grace our screens and bring the world such joy while standing in solidarity alongside those who suffer pain from those very same Olympic Games.
Jules Boykoff is a professor of politics and government at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. His writing on the connection between politics and sport have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times and New Left Review. He is also a former professional soccer player who represented the US U-23 men’s national team in international competition.
What Are the Olympics For? by Jules Boykoff is available on the Bristol University website in print and as an audiobook for £8.99.
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