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Paris 2024 Olympics chief: “We are ready”
Eight months ahead of the 2024 Summer Olympics, Tony Estanguet says Paris plans to offer “a fantastic moment of celebration.”
Estanguet serves as President of the Paris 2024 host committee and led the hard-fought battle to bring the Games back to the city for the first time in 100 years.
The three-time Olympic gold medalist, a canoeist, is one of the most decorated French athletes and the first to win gold in three different Olympiads. In 2022, he served as his nation’s flag-bearer at the Beijing Games.
“I lived (my) first life as an athlete and my life completely changed, thanks to the Olympics and sport,” Estanguet told GZERO’s Tony Maciulis.
On the sidelines of the recent Paris Peace Forum, Estanguet said Paris is ready to host an estimated 10 million spectators across 41 venues in and around the city. The city recently had a spate of bad publicity over bed bug infestation, a story Estanguet says is “ridiculous.” “People will criticize,” he said, but “we are ready to welcome the world.”
France is not, however, prepared to welcome the Russian flag. President Emmanuel Macron said in September that Russia has no place at the Games due to war crimes committed during its ongoing war in Ukraine. While the International Olympic Committee will ultimately decide, Macron wants Russian athletes to compete under the Russian Olympic Committee flag instead.
“Definitely there is impact on political side, but what is really important for me to protect and to preserve is the fact that the decisions are made from the sport movement,” Estanguet said.
The 2024 Summer Games begin on Friday, July 26.
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Haiti unrest: Will the UN's troop deployment help restore peace?
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week on World In :60.
Will the UN's deployment of troops to Haiti help bring peace to the country?
It certainly won't hurt, you know, a thousand Kenyan troops being deployed, as well as lots support for training of police and militias. There's been no government in Haiti. It's been taken over by gangs, massive amounts of violence and vigilantism in response. They need help. The UN's history in Haiti has been absolutely checkered and problematic. And so there are a lot of people that are concerned about this. But on balance, I'm really glad that finally someone is getting something done better. Frankly, if the US and Canada had played at least some role in this, given that their/our backyard.
Despite all his legal issues, is Trump still the candidate-to-beat in the race for the GOP nomination?
Oh, absolutely. And, you know, you know that I mean, we're seeing only gains compared to all the other candidates. The real question is, can trump win the presidency? And at this point, you have to say, of course, it's plausible, in part because the Republicans are performing better in the views of the voters, the electorate on the economy. Certainly illegal immigration numbers on the back of pent up demand and nobody moving for a few years of pandemic are now at record levels again. And there's very little Biden can do before the election to stop it. And of course, he's seen as too old to run and that's not going to be less true in 14 months. Trump has his own litany of serious personal challenges, and the Democrats and a lot of independents hate him with a true passion. That certainly matters. The abortion issue certainly matters, and incumbency certainly matters. So right now, if you make me make a bet, I'd still bet that Biden is likely to win by a little, but it's real close. I have no confidence in that call.
Bed bugs in Paris. My God. Would you still attend the Summer Olympics?
I thought bed bugs were things you caught in a bed. Like in a bed that's not clean. We need to change the name, at least, because apparently people are getting bed bugs in movie theaters and on metros and all over these public places in Paris. So I think we can't call them bed bugs. The first I want Macron to give us a new, more patriotic name for this animal that apparently anybody can catch pretty much anywhere. And yeah, it wouldn't stop me from going to Paris Olympics, though I've got a lot of other stuff I need to do, but I'd probably be a little careful where I sit down, crowded places and things like that. I don't know. Can't do any. There’s not any cream you put on yourself to avoid bed bugs. Who the hell knows? I guess you're going to find out if you're going to Paris.
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Olympic dispatch: Business as usual despite pandemic, geopolitical risks
Olympic dispatch: Business as usual despite pandemic, geopolitical risks
Last week I wrote about why hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics in the shadow of Covid, diplomatic boycotts, and a fraught geopolitical environment was a risky bet for China. But now that the Beijing Games are firmly underway, I have to say they are going pretty well for the host.
On the pandemic front, China has thus far been effective at containing infections within the Olympic “bubble.” Sporting events have been only minimally disrupted. Authorities also seem to be succeeding at keeping said bubble tightly sealed and quarantined from the general population, key to ensuring the sustainability of the country’s zero-Covid policy should an outbreak pop up.To be sure, most people (including the Chinese!) are still feeling blasé about these Olympics. Last Friday’s opening ceremony drew 43% fewer TV viewers than the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games. But the same could be said about the 2021 Tokyo Summer Olympics, also underwhelming but hardly scandalous. Public interest in the Olympics has been on a steady decline for many years. Beyond this trend and the lack of crowds to cheer on the athletes, though, we haven’t seen any significant Covid- or politics-related disruptions to the Games. That’s a win in China’s book.
This is not to say that these Olympics will prove as valuable for Beijing as the 2008 Summer Games did—they won’t. Back then, China was a debutante on the global stage, and the international community—including President George W. Bush, who was in attendance—was impressed by Beijing’s display of newfound wealth and technological development. Today’s world is much less sympathetic to China on account of its human rights record, its growing authoritarianism at home, and its assertiveness in the international arena. In fact, a handful of countries, including Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and India, joined a US-led diplomatic boycott of the Olympics in protest of China’s crimes against its Uyghur minorities.
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But the vast majority of countries, including most of Washington’s European and Asian allies, declined to follow suit. As a result, the boycott isn’t all that symbolically useful. It has neither changed Beijing’s repressive policies, affected the course of the Games, nor driven much of the conversation since the events started. NBC is still broadcasting the events and hewing to a mostly apolitical editorial line. Corporate sponsors have remained largely silent and are still flying their banners over the event venues. And even the few athletes who have condemned China’s abuses are still competing.
On balance, America’s failure to convince key allies like Germany, France, Japan, and South Korea to join the campaign probably bolstered President Xi Jinping’s ability to make the case to his domestic audience that China is under siege from a hostile West that is nevertheless too divided (and therefore too weak) to force Beijing to kneel. The fact that the opening ceremony cynically featured an ethnic Uyghur as torchbearer signals just how confident Xi is in China’s Teflon—and how limited the impact of the US boycott was.
The Olympics also served as a stage for Xi Jinping to consolidate his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The joint statements from the summit held on the sidelines of the opening ceremony make it clear that Xi and Putin view their interests vis-à-vis the United States as increasingly aligned. Both leaders see American behavior in their neighborhoods (the Indo-Pacific and Eastern Europe) as a national security threat, and both are eager to work together to shake up the status quo at the expense of global stability. While tactical alignment between China and Russia is not unprecedented, their budding strategic partnership—an alliance in all but name—is challenging news for the US and the world.
To be clear, there’s a lot that could still go wrong for China in the next two weeks. Covid containment policies work until they don’t, and we can’t discount the possibility that one or more athletes will speak up against Beijing on live TV.
But so far, it’s looking like smooth sailing for China.
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The Winter Olympics in a divided world
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here, and a happy start of the week to you. Got your Quick Take to get you going on a Monday, and why not talk about the Olympics, the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, so different from the Summer Olympics that they hosted back in 2008, when the American president was there, and was enormously impressed, and this was China coming out onto the world stage, and seen as a global leader. Though the presumption in the West was still as they got wealthier and more powerful, and we let them into global leadership roles, including hosting the Olympics, they would eventually become more of a free market and more democratic. And of course, that was wrong.
In fact, that was probably the single most wrong thing, most wrong view that was held over the past couple of decades by the foreign policy establishment of the West, irrespective of what side of the aisle you're on. But anyway, here we are in 2022, and it is a much more divided world. It is a much more geopolitically fractious world, and it's a world where a lot of people are saying and saying things that are pretty unhappy about Beijing hosting this Winter Olympics. People thought it was going to be very geopolitically fraught. So far, that's not been the case. It's been more or less Olympics as pandemic usual, which means no crowds kind of lockdown, but also means not a lot really happening on the political front.
So there have been a handful of diplomatic boycotts of the Olympics by the United States and a few allies. Most Europeans chose not to go along. The Japanese chose not to go along. Countries like Australia, for example, the UK have. And then the surprise on that front, India, but this was really self-inflicted by the Chinese government. The Indians were planning on sending a delegation, and then the Chinese government decided to include among the torchbearers a Chinese soldier that had been injured in the territorial dispute up in the Himalayas between India and China, and actual fighting between the two sides, which the Indian see as overwhelmingly having been precipitated by the Chinese. So once that happened, the Indians said, "We're out."
But I mean, frankly, the fact that the Chinese felt confident enough to do that, the fact that the Chinese felt confident enough to have an ethnic Uyghur lighting the Olympic flame, I mean, these are signs of confidence, signs of, we don't care what you say or do, the West. And frankly, no athletes decided to boycott, and no corporate sponsoring decided to boycott. And so you put all of that together, and well over 90% of the countries of the world did not join in a diplomatic boycott. So I think the Chinese government feels pretty comfortable in all that. Where they feel much less comfortable is how this closed-loop Olympics is going to work, and whether or not they can ensure, first of all, minimum case spread inside the Olympics itself, therefore minimum disruption of the Olympic events. So far, reasonably good marks on that. Probably B+, A-.
And also most importantly, can they ensure that there is no spread from the Olympics into the Chinese population at large? So far, that looks good. Certainly no reported cases. If it was a very small number of cases, I doubt we would find out about it. The Chinese government would have high incentive not to make that known. But nonetheless, so far, if you are the Chinese leadership, you're feeling pretty good about the way all of this is going on.
I will say, by the way, I've watched a little bit of the Olympics. I'm not one of these people that says, "Oh, there's a diplomatic boycott, and so we should cut everything off." First of all, I don't believe in punishing the athletes who have spent their entire lives training for this moment, in most cases, and taking it away because we are politically unhappy with the Chinese government. Seems like they should not be the people that suffer. I mean, if the average American isn't willing to do without Chinese goods on their table because they're a little bit cheaper, then I'm sure as hell, I'm not willing to talk to hundreds of American athletes and say, "Sorry, you've got no shot at what you've prepared your entire life for." So I don't think that's fair.
And I also like to believe that sports are international sports, et cetera, one of those places where we try to put politics as much aside as possible. That doesn't mean I'd be in favor of the North Koreans hosting the Olympics, for example. It doesn't mean, I think none of this stuff matters. Of course, it does. But when it comes to China, it's such an important relationship, and of course, is a relationship that is among close to economic and technological equals, which in reality limits the ability of the Americans to dictate how the Chinese should behave very different than the US-Mexico relationship, for example, or others. And that's just reality, irrespective of whether or not I'm happy about it. But I mean, you still can't deny reality.
And I also think that it's important, given the interdependence in the relationship, to focus areas of conflict on those that we need to have, like on Chinese theft of intellectual property, or like on massive human rights abuses like with the Uyghurs, which the Americans consider to be act of genocide. I'm all in favor of the sanctions against those companies that are engaged in slave labor, or otherwise benefiting from that unconscionable series of decisions that the Chinese government had taken against their own citizens. But that's very different from saying, "I want to see the Olympics get boycotted."
I haven't watched all that much, in part because I'm busy, but I did see a little bit of the opening ceremony because I wanted to see how the international media was covering it. And I would say it's been a difficult needle to thread, but they've mostly given the fact that they're there. They certainly aren't just saying things the Chinese government would like. I mean, whether I saw NBC coverage, and I've seen some international coverage, and generally, I would say they're doing a reasonably down the straight and narrow job of, "We're not politics correspondents, we're sports correspondents, we're entertainment correspondent, but we are going to present the honest reality around the controversy here.” And the controversy is real.
And then beyond that, I watched the curling between the US and Canada, the mixed curling. The Americans got smoked. I was a little sad about that. I like curling. I was very disappointed with the uniforms. Usually, the uniform is very good. I also like curling because it feels to me like the one Olympic sport that if I just stopped being a political scientist and dedicated five years of my life at nothing but curling, I would have a shot of being on an Olympics team somewhere. Maybe not the US. I might need dual citizenship, but I mean, Honduras doesn't have a curling team. This feels like an opportunity. Furthermore, I don't know why I came up with Honduras. Just felt like a place that wouldn't necessarily have a curling team watch. I'm going to check it out, and they're going to have one. I'm going to seriously embarrassed, but I'm feeling good about it, feeling good about it.
And finally, I just say that the big story, of course, that's come out the Olympics so far, if you're a political scientist who is watching the news, was Putin at the opening ceremony. And here, I do feel pretty strongly that the Russia-China relationship is increasingly becoming an alliance, because the Chinese see American behavior in Asia, diplomatic, economic security, the creation of the Quad, AUKUS, the rest as very analogous to the way the Russians have for decades now perceived the United States and behavior with NATO in Eastern Europe. And so I do think that as the Chinese, we're unhappy with Russia's revisionism. With Russia, "I want to blow up and undermine the global order," China is increasingly aligning with that Russian perspective. Long term, it's a dangerous thing for the world. It's certainly not a good thing for the Americans and American allies, whether in the Atlantic or across the Pacific. But it is meaningful. It is real, and the joint statement between the Chinese and the Russians on Ukraine certainly implied a level of Chinese alignment with Russian demands about Ukraine and the European security system.
I will caveat that with saying that China has never recognized Crimea as part of Russia, and China still favors a diplomatic resolution through the Minsk dialogues of the occupied territory of the Donbas. So they're only going so far. They don't want to fight. They want a diplomatic resolution, but they're putting their finger on the scale of the Russians, and this certainly helps Putin to a degree, as well as willingness of China to invest more, trade more with the Russians and the like in the run up to a couple of very critical weeks of negotiations between the Russians, the Americans, the French, the Germans, and the rest of NATO.
So that's where we are, and I am glad that the athletes are able to participate in their life dream. And for those of you that are watching, I hope you find it all entertaining. And for the rest of us, let's get on with the week. Talk to you all soon. Be good.
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An employee is seen while people undergo PCR tests for COVID-19 upon their arrival at Beijing Capital International Airport ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics. The 24th Winter Olympic Games are scheduled to take place in Beijing on February 4-20, 2022.
Hard Numbers: COVID bursts Olympic bubble, Italian prez re-elected, Yemeni child soldiers, Peruvian ecocide
34: The organizers of the Beijing Winter Olympics reported on Sunday 34 new COVID infections within the "bubble" set up for the Games, where athletes can only compete if they test negative twice in 24 hours. Troubling news for China's zero-COVID policy.
8: After eight rounds of secret voting, Italian lawmakers on Saturday "elected" Sergio Mattarella to serve another seven-year term as president. Mattarella, 80, agreed to postpone his retirement so Mario Draghi could stay on as PM.
2,000: According to the UN, almost 2,000 child soldiers recruited by Houthi rebels died fighting in Yemen's civil war from January 2020 to May 2021. GZERO World recently reported on the Yemeni conflict, the biggest humanitarian crisis you've probably never heard of.
12,000: Peru has barred execs from Spanish energy giant Repsol charged with "ecocide" from leaving the country, while authorities investigate an oil spill that leaked almost 12,000 barrels of crude into the sea. Repsol says the accident was caused by the tsunami triggered by a massive volcanic eruption in Tonga.
COVID at the Beijing Winter Olympics
China's zero-COVID strategy will be put to its biggest test to date with the Beijing Winter Olympics approach.
Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, says Chinese officials think they are taking the safest approach, but that may not be enough against the more transmissible omicron variant.
That's a big risk for Xi Jinping, who hasn't left the country in almost two years — but doesn't want to become isolated on the global stage.
“When other countries learn to live with the virus, and the pandemic's becoming an endemic,” Huang says. “China will find that zero-tolerance strategy unsustainable."
China, he predicts may be able to sustain zero COVID for another year, but not much longer.
Watch his interview with Ian Bremmer on GZERO World: Omicron & the undoing of China's COVID strategy
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If You Ain’t First…
If You Ain’t First…
I had a quiet moment at breakfast on Sunday and came across a fascinating study as the Olympics closing ceremony played in the background. From the abstract:
This paper investigates the effects of competition outcomes on health by using U.S. Olympic medalists' lifespans and medal colors as a natural experiment. Whereas the life expectancies of gold and bronze medalists do not differ significantly, life expectancy of silver medalists is about 2.4 and 3.9 years less than these former, respectively. These findings are readily explainable by insights from behavioral economics, psychology, and human biology, which suggest that (perceived) dissatisfactory competition outcomes may adversely affect health.
The authors find that Olympic silver medalists on average live significantly shorter lives than gold and bronze medalists. Gold is not too surprising, but bronze?
The reason is well understood by experts: Happier people live longer—that’s a fact. Silver medalists consider their performance to be a loss and are therefore disappointed, while bronze and gold medalists perceive it as a win and are elated. When they think about what could have been, the counterfactual for silver medalists is “I almost won gold,” whereas for bronze it’s “At least I won a medal.” Cue this meme.
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If winning an Olympic silver medal seems like a hard-to-relate problem, you’re right, it is. But I suspect the psychology at work applies beyond Olympians to comparatively normal folks like you and me, and maybe even to whole societies.
After all, aren’t most of us taught to treat life as a race? Competitive drive is core to the American ethos, as American as baseball/NASCAR (politics is ruining our metaphors!) and apple pie. The American dream promises that with enough hard work and determination, there is nothing you can’t achieve. No mountain high enough. No Joneses you can’t keep up with. But this promise has its peril. For someone to be successful at something, there must be someone (even slightly) less successful than them. We can’t all be winners. In the words of Ricky Bobby, “If you ain’t first, you’re last!”
Silver medalists look back and think that gold was within reach. Anything but gold is a failure. It doesn’t matter that they just beat every single human being except one. Second place is the first loser—an even bigger loser than third place. I grew up with plenty of people who feel that way. Sure, they’re still better off than most of the world population. But the gap used to be so much wider. And they thought they would do so much better.
They’re not alone. Over the last 20 years, a large minority of Americans—non-Hispanic white men without college degrees—have seen their relative living standards stagnate. Their parents had been better off than their grandparents, and they were sure the same would happen to them. Suddenly, the march of progress came to a halt. For some, it even reversed. Importantly, other people—other groups of people—were getting ahead. That was certainly not supposed to happen.
Can this mismatch between expectations and reality explain the stark rise in deaths of despair among middle-aged white men? Can it account for the rise of Trump and Trumpian politics? I don’t know, but it seems plausible.
Let me stretch the analogy further. Is it possible that America’s perceived relative decline on the global stage over the last 20 years has taken a toll on our national psyche? Did we fail to adjust our expectations for America’s role in the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the unipolar moment? We have been trying to defend a lead that feels to many like it’s slipping (even though it’s really not). We have everything to lose and little to gain, except not losing. Playing not to lose sure feels more stressful, and risky, than playing to win. Heavy is the head and all that. The question for you, readers, is can the US afford to continue aiming for gold – and expecting to win it every time – in a GZERO world?
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Would athletes be exempt from a Beijing 2022 Olympics boycott?
Will Western nations boycott next year's Beijing Winter Olympics over China's human rights abuses in Xinjiang? Probably not, says the International Olympic Committee's Dick Pound. But some countries, he anticipates, may opt to only send their athletes — like his native Canada, which has a lot of diplomatic issues with the Chinese. Pound, a former Olympian athlete himself, spoke in an interview with Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.
Watch the episode: Politics, protest & the Olympics: the IOC's Dick Pound
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