Dark cloud over City of Light

Sweatier, stinkier, slimier. Such descriptors have replaced Citius, Altius, Fortius — Faster, Higher, Stronger — as the Olympics motto. At least for Paris 2024.

- ROSIE DIMANNO

Triathlon athletes dive into the Seine River during a test event in Paris last August. High temperatures and a polluted Seine are two formidable hurdles for Paris organizers as the Olympics begin in a matter or weeks, Rosie DiManno writes.

The City of Light is having more than a moment of dark doubts, although Games organizers remain stalwartly confident, in that shoulder-shrugging Gallic way: They ne regrette rien.

Sweltering temperatures? Nary a bead of perspiration condensing on tall foreheads. A septic River Seine? C’est la vie.

Parisians don’t understand what they perceive as whiny complaining from North Americans who can’t handle summertime heat. Few apartments in the city have central air conditioning and box units don’t fit most buildings. So they went ahead and constructed an Olympic Village for more than 15,000 athletes and officials with no A/C.

Their brilliant alternative was to hold down temps in athletes’ rooms — to between 23 C and 26 C — via a geothermal network of pipes pumping cooling water from 70 metres underground. Oh, and every room gets a fan.

Discomfiting athletes was less important than staging what they boast will be the greenest Games ever, cutting carbon emissions by half from London 2012 and Rio 2016, whilst fitting into an ambitious program aimed at making the city carbon-neutral by 2050.

“I have a lot of respect for the comfort of the athletes,” Mayor Anne Hidalgo, firmly socialist and environmentally crusading, has said. “But I’m thinking even more about the survival of humanity.”

Well merde to that, has been the response by many Olympic delegations.