(Bloomberg) -- As Tom Cruise rappelled from the roof of Paris’s Stade de France on Sunday night to seize the Olympic flag and pass it on to Los Angeles for the next Games, the French officials watching could finally breath a sigh of relief.
After years of preparations and a great deal of skepticism — most notably from Parisians themselves — the first Olympic Games in the French capital in a century had blossomed into a popular success. A record 9.5 million tickets were sold for contests held across the city, often beside the city’s famous monuments.
A week before the Games kicked off, two-thirds of the French said they were either indifferent, worried or angry about the Olympics, according to an Ifop poll.
On the morning of the opening ceremony, sabotage of the country’s high-speed train lines affected hundreds of thousands of travelers, as if confirming the public’s worst fears. The ceremony that kicked off the Games, complete with a flotilla of boats carrying the athletes down the Seine river, took place under a disheartening downpour.
But the French loved the show and the mood changed overnight, as athletes won their first medals in spectacular venues showcasing the Eiffel Tower and the Versailles Palace. Even the swimming events in the Seine, following the city’s costly cleanup of the waterway, took place — though some were postponed to allow bacteria to fall to safe levels. It didn’t hurt that French athletes won a record number of medals.
A lot of what could have gone wrong didn’t. Metro lines ran smoothly, and were less crowded than feared after many Parisians fled to the countryside. And no major security issues in Paris spoiled the event, perhaps owing to the thousands of highly visible police and military personnel patrolling the city.
“We’ve heard a lot over the past years from a huge number of experts who told us everything you’ve done in the last few weeks was impossible,” President Emmanuel Macron told a gathering of people involved in the Olympics on Monday. “Well, thank you, because you’ve done it.”
The Games look set to boost French economic growth by about a quarter of a percentage point in the third quarter, according to a monthly survey by the country’s central bank. Any longer-term business and economic impact will take time to assess.
Not everyone benefited. Carriers including Delta Air Lines Inc. and Air France-KLM said that tourists steering clear of Paris this summer hurt sales. Luxury groups like Hermes International indicated that the Olympics might curb sales at its Parisian boutiques.
The organizers sought to avoid the fate of previous host cities for whom the Olympics proved ruinously expensive. Paris used existing venues and set up temporary facilities for staging the Games — rather than spending lavishly.
The Athens Games two decades ago famously left the city with costly abandoned venues, while the more recent London and Rio editions went far over budget. In 2020, Tokyo had to postpone the event to the next year due to Covid, leading to additional costs.
Private companies were key to the Paris Games’ finances. The organizers set an operating budget of $4.7 billion, mostly financed by the private sector. Luxury group LVMH alone spent some €150 million ($164 million) as a premium sponsor of the Games. Another $4.7 billion was budgeted for infrastructure costs, with any new buildings aimed at boosting underserved neighborhoods.
“Given the modest cost of the Games, we can expect that the event will be neutral for the French state in the short term,” said Luc Arrondel, a sports economist at the Paris School of Economics. Longer-term benefits could come from increased tourism, as well as new and future investments. “The feel-good factor among the French population will probably be the biggest immediate profit,” he said.
More controversial was the €1.4 billion spent to clean up the Seine, as many Parisians remain skeptical that swimming in the river will ever catch on. Macron and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, by contrast, say the effort will be one of the long-lasting legacies of Paris 2024.
In the shorter-term, Macron will try to keep the good will going through the Paralympic Games, starting in late August, and a parade of the victorious athletes down the Champs-Elysees, on Sept. 14.
--With assistance from Julius Domoney.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
