Sure, the sport will be spectacular. I have tickets for the athletics, and I am looking forward to that. But as the opening ceremony draws closer, there are worrying signs that the event is turning into a financial failure.
Air France reported earlier this month that it expected to report a loss of €180m in the current quarter. Why? Because lots of flyers are avoiding the city, expecting it to be far more crowded than usual.
That is a double blow for the French government since it owns 29pc of the airline, and its shares are down by 40pc this year (unlike British Airways owner IAG, up by 12pc since January). Other airlines are also suffering, with America’s Delta only this week announcing a $100m (£77m) hit on weaker bookings to Paris.
Likewise, hotel bookings are disappointing. There are some peak days around the opening ceremony, but over the entire Olympics period occupancy is now below the 81.4pc level the city saw in July 2023, according to a report from Insee, France’s official statistics agency. Prices are steadily falling as well, with the expectations of the sky-high cost of a room fading as the event approaches, and rates steadily falling to fill empty ones. In plain language, Paris’s hotels are having a worse summer than usual.
Even the sponsorship to capitalise on the global television audience has hardly been a huge success. The organising committee has said it will meet its $1.2bn target from major corporations. But it had to be helped out at the last minute by the billionaire Bernard Arnault, with his LVMH empire stepping in with €150m of promotion, prompting some accusations that this will be the first “luxury games”.
It is hardly cynical to imagine that Arnault, who is very closely connected to President Macron, felt duty-bound to help out and opened his chequebook to make sure the Games did not crash. But it is hardly a great advert for the power of associating a business with the Olympics.
Meanwhile, the city may well not even be ready, with the Seine still too polluted for events planned on the river, and, with grim inevitability, French public sector workers already threatening strikes if they are not offered some extra money. Add it all up, and it is not looking good.
