Olympic athletes are going to be on the hot seat this summer in Paris.
Not just metaphorically; the Paris Olympic Committee wants this Olympics to be the greenest ever (take that, Classical Greeks!), and one of the measures they have taken is to build the Olympic village without any air conditioning.
There will be no air conditioning in athletes’ rooms at #Paris2024, which pledged to host the ‘greenest ever’ Olympic Games. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo spoke to @Reuters about the city’s plans to keep athletes cool https://t.co/Js9skXtWoF pic.twitter.com/uVBMusztdi
— Reuters (@Reuters) March 14, 2024
I think this is one virtue signal that will see plenty of athletes breathing fire and with smoke coming out of their ears.
The French are very proud of the fact that all these athletes and visitors who flew on private and chartered jets are going to emit fewer pounds of CO2 once they arrive in Paris; sure, their commitment to climate virtue signaling didn’t prevent them from emitting tons of CO2 in preparation for the event, but then again nobody was watching them closely then.
Not everybody is thrilled with the decision, perhaps because athletes suffering from heat exhaustion might not perform optimally, or even for the simple reason that going to bed sweating kinda sucks eggs.
“Our clear wish is that there should be air-conditioning in all rooms,” the Norwegian Committee told Reuters, with Brazil saying “the heat forecast” made it “necessary to invest in renting air-conditioning units for the entire delegation”.
Australia’s Chef de Mission Anna Meares said they were “looking at portable air conditioners to offer the athletes should they choose to if it gets hot, if it’s uncomfortable”.
The Canadian Olympic Committee told Reuters it had “implemented a number of heat mitigation strategies in Paris to complement the measures put in place by the Paris 2024 Organising Committee, including air conditioning units in some athlete rooms in case of extreme heat”.
What matters for Hidalgo, however, is that the athletes’ village, which will be home to some 6,000 Parisiens after the Games, is a sustainable project.
This is, of course, totally absurd. There is nothing “sustainable” about an Olympics, and nobody should pretend otherwise. The last “sustainable” Olympics was in 393 A.D., when the ancient Olympics were shut down because Pope Theodocius I decreed them a pagan ritual and they were banned.
Jerk.
For over a thousand years, the Olympics were “sustainable” and “green,” but the modern Olympics are massive displays of excess and international political competition. France’s contribution to the competitive spirit appears to be arrogance and virtue signaling, and they have proven to excel in that arena.
Perhaps, though, this is a bid to bring back the tradition of competing in the nude, this time not to display the ideal human physique at work but to hasten the cooling process that sweating profusely provides to the human body.
On a more serious note, I generally approve of the idea of finding innovative solutions to reduce inefficiencies in any system and maximizing natural cooling is as legitimate a way to do so as anything else. But the point should be to make things better for human beings, not to make sacrifices to the god Gaia.
Perhaps this proves Theodocius I right; the Olympics have once again become a pagan ritual.
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