Brannavan Gnanalingam on the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to combine his two favourite things: mooching around Paris and watching the Olympics.

At the end of the most successful Olympics ever for New Zealand athletes, it’s probably the safest time to say that I’m a massive Olympics nerd. In fact, Aotearoa’s performance at the Summer Olympics would be my Mastermind topic. 

My first memory is Barcelona in 1992, those sun-drenched Olympics as Spain was coming out of its Franco shadow (although to be fair, I was more concerned about Spinning Rhombus and the spirited performances by Lorraine Moller and an unknown swimmer called Danyon Loader). As an eight-year-old, I’d wake up at 3am to watch sports I’d never heard of. I became obsessed by the cornucopia of athletic prowess. I obtained otherwise useless knowledge of how the modern pentathlon worked, how to tell if elbows are locked in the clean and jerk, or how to score a points race.

I’ve religiously watched every ensuing Olympics, except for Sydney as I was overseas (and therefore, perhaps, to blame for Aotearoa’s dire performance at those Games). I made sure I watched as much as I could live, waking up at all hours, whether it was Loader’s double golds, Ulmer smashing the world record in winning the individual pursuit, the triathlon one-two, Valerie Adams’ domination, Cohen and Sullivan’s late charge, the photo finish wins for Drysdale and the Evers-Swindell twins, etc. Those watching this year would have seen the best medal performance by a New Zealand team, ever, including witnessing two likely GOATs in Lisa Carrington and Ellese Andrews. 

I was never good enough to contemplate attending the Olympics as a competitor. I discovered that early on, when I – along with everybody else, to be fair – got smoked by Nick Willis in the Hutt Secondary School Champs. I then discovered what his training regime as a 14-year-old was like, which I guess explains why he won two Olympic medals in the blue riband athletics event, and why I ended up writing about teenage parties instead.

For many of us Olympic enthusiasts, there’s the nostalgia from watching it as kids, the school projects where you’d be assigned a random country to research (I know quite a lot of facts about Finland, as a result), or the classic Kiwi thing of probably knowing or once competing against a champion athlete. Some sports fans complain about how Americans valorise the clutch performers, but I’m an absolute convert to that idea – there is something compelling about those who perform when it really matters. There really is nothing more clutch than winning when the chance only comes along every four years. Putting that aside, it’s an opportunity to see people who are experts in something ply their trade against other experts, regardless of whether they win or not.

I also adore Paris, having lived there in my 20s, and being an obsessive consumer of French film, literature, painting, and yes, even their music. There is no country in the world like France, in which the arts are so gloriously embedded in everyday culture (with the possible exception of Iran). I was a stereotypical flâneur in my time there, someone who walked the streets as a so-called connoisseur of the street, and otherwise spent it drunk, mostly penniless, and having the best time. I also wrote a gloomy novel in 2013 called You Should Have Come Here When You Were Not Here that satirised a certain kind of liberal who moves to Paris, while also cautioning about the rise of fascism in Europe – the front cover and opening paragraph both feature the far right Le Front National / Rassemblement National. It’s both my favourite, and probably least-read, novel.

I ended up back in France for the Olympics, in the immediate aftermath of the stunning loss by the RN in the snap elections called by president Emmanuel Macron (although, whether this simply temporarily staves things off for a couple of years is another question). We arrived in France via the East, and saw significant amounts of anti-RN graffiti and pro-New Popular Front throughout the towns and cities in Alsace and Lorraine. I thought I might combine two of my favourite things: the Olympics and Paris.

The organisers in Paris had the audacious plan to incorporate the city into the events itself (those who know something about the way the French conceptualise museums and public spaces should not be that surprised at this idea). It was genius too: when you have one of the most beautiful cities in the world, why not use it? I’d turn around while watching the triathlon and go, oh yep, I’m just standing between the Pont Alexandre III and Les Invalides, two of my favourite structures in the whole world.

Paris itself is a city built on nostalgia. It looks largely the same as it did at the turn of the 20th Century, constructed via its massive contribution to global art, its breathtaking monuments, and its sweeping boulevards. The fashion houses used images and costumes from the last time Paris hosted the Olympics in 1924, while athlete photos from 1924 were digitally manipulated to create music videos. The hockey was played in the 1924 stadium. Because Paris largely re-used existing venues, the main legacy project was the clean-up of the Seine, presumably trying to go back to the era when the river was being used by Vikings for raids.

We detected some initial cynicism about the Olympics when we arrived. That all changed however, when Antoine Dupont led the French men’s sevens team to gold. Rugby is already a major sport in France, and there was lingering disappointment about how the Rugby World Cup went late last year. However, Dupont instigating a win over the previously unbeatable Fijians, on the opening day of medals, in front of a packed crowd at Stade de France, was enough for the French public to explode in enthusiasm. This was noticeable in the available tickets for random events – events that had tickets available suddenly became sold out. People seemed to shrug their shoulders and say, let’s party.

We arrived in Paris soon after Pauline Ferrand-Prévot smashed the mountain bike field, and Léon Marchand started his domination in the pool, and the Parisians were all-in. I hadn’t witnessed such a party vibe in a sports setting, well, ever. (I guess my point of comparison is monotone “All Blacks, All Blacks” chants, not entire crowds singing in falsetto to Plastic Bertrand’s ‘Ça Plane Pour Moi’.) The French were marvellous supporters – something I noticed immediately when I went along to the women’s sevens, soundtracked by the ubiquitous use of ‘Hello’ by Martin Solveig and Dragonette. The French fans were exploding in love when their team came fifth, but oohing and ahhing over every single moment in all of the games. To be fair, they were largely supporting Canada in the final, purely as they were the underdogs, but there was enough respect for the Black Ferns Sevens. 

There was no room for politics within that party. Much of the anti-RN graffiti in Paris had been scrubbed clean. There were basically no visible Palestinian flags (contrasting with the other parts of Europe and France we’d seen). Breaker Manizha Talash was disqualified for wearing a cape saying “Free Afghan Women”. Taiwanese flags were confiscated by security at stadiums. The outside horrors – the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, the terror attack in Mogadishu, or the Bangladeshi protests – were relegated to the back page. 

Yet, politics seeped through, such as when the so-called culture warriors decided to turn their attention to two female boxers of colour, Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, fuelled both by populist politicians from Italy, Hungary, Russia and the US (all of whom incidentally had targeted LGBT people in their own countries) and bored billionaires. We saw visible signs of a counter-protest by Algerian and Taiwanese fans, furious at yet more targeting of women of colour (following the Sebastian Coe-led attack on African runners, such as Caster Semenya, over the last decade). Khelif’s win was celebrated long and hard by Algerians in particular (who form a sizable population in France).

Nostalgia is a funny concept. Nowadays, it is mostly viewed as a sentimental harking back to a former golden age, where a madeleine, for example, can evoke a childhood memory. Yet its Greek origins (and the way Proust actually uses nostalgia) makes it clear that nostalgia has pain and suffering in-built into it. There’s a deep sadness in the way you can never actually return back. 

Nostalgia can also efface. While the Olympics are built on nostalgia – the camaraderie and friendship inherent in the Olympic spirit, the idea that the Ancient Games temporarily ended wars as everyone participated together – that ignores the rampant consumerism (especially post-1984 Olympics), the awkward nationalism, the cheating, and the ridiculous pressure placed on athletes to win. The nostalgia around Paris, too, can efface – cities frozen in time can struggle to accommodate current inhabitants, the sweeping grand boulevards were built to stop barricades and revolutions, the beautiful arcades were built to ensure rich people didn’t have to encounter poor people when they went shopping, and the monuments were financed by, well, empire and war. Nostalgia without specificity also has a critical role in fascism, for example – it’s easy to say things are bad now, if you can successfully focus attention on a mythical and ill-defined past.  

Maybe though, nostalgia is a bit of a dead-end when it comes to the Olympics, despite its central place in the messaging. Nostalgia isn’t actually why many sports fans love watching the Olympics. There’s an argument that most forms of popular culture have splintered – audience convenience, the way genres have mutated into thousands of genres and subgenres, and the mass availability of most art forms on multiple platforms, have all meant people do not readily consume culture at the same time as everybody else. Sport is the one exception. I don’t need to see something live to enjoy (although, I’m not going to lie, being at the Olympics was pretty damn great). I treasure my sport group-chats, where my friends and I react to the same thing at the same time. 

As a spectator, and a fan, there were moments that were indelible, which transcended all of my over-thinking about the Olympics. As a starting point, I think the athletics competition these Olympics were the best I’ve ever seen – you could write a full-length essay about the finishes to the 100m final, the men’s 1500m final, the women’s marathon, the men’s steeplechase final, or Femke Bol’s final leg in the mixed 4 x 400m relay (witnessing that blistering back stretch was something else). I saw Alex Yee’s Terminator eyes about a 1km out from the finish line, as he hunted down the brave run from Hayden Wilde in the men’s triathlon. Half of Belgium seemed to be at the same corner as me in Montmartre as Remco Evenepoel cycled past. I saw Carlos Alcaraz play a shot to win a break that I still cannot figure out from an angle point of view. I shouted myself hoarse in the stands as Brooke Francis and Lucy Spoors bravely took the race to the favoured Romanians. I woke up with jet lag in time to watch fellow 1.5 generation kid Lydia Ko bawl her eyes out during the national anthem, which swelled this 1.5 generation kid’s deadened heart. 

Paris used the Impressionists as part of its marketing for the Olympics, and advertisements for D’Orsay’s collection of such masterworks were everywhere in the city. The Impressionists focused on capturing moments, such as flickers of light, movement, the way colours and shadows look from a certain angle, impressions over any sense of rules or order. The Olympics capture a similar kind of transience: bodies in incredible motion, moments of perfection, the overwhelming sense of tension, of despair, or of joy. I’m someone who refuses to watch closing ceremonies, as I hate the idea of it all being over, with real-life inexorably filtering back in, but I have to remind myself that it’s the ephemeralness that makes it all so beautiful.