Editorial|One of the winners of the Paris Olympics is the Seine River, which has been cleaned of sewage for swimming.
Urheilu’s super summer culminates on Friday, when the Paris Olympics begin. Top sports with more than 10,000 athletes can be expected. The competitions are spread all over Paris, where up to 15 million visitors are expected during the Olympics and Paralympics.
However, the races are held in unstable conditions. Sports are being played in Paris at the same time as Ukraine is fighting for life and death. In Gaza, the suffering is widespread. The situation has led to a political tightrope walk and massive security measures.
The sports sanctions imposed as a result of the Russian war of aggression have been adhered to. Russia has been excluded from the Games, as has its ally Belarus. However, the International Olympic Committee IOC has granted permission to participate to at least 14 Russian and 11 Belarusian athletes. They compete under a neutral flag without country emblems and national anthems.
The decision has divided countries. The strong non-camp includes the Nordic countries, the Baltic countries and Poland. The IOC has accused the critics of the decision of hypocrisy and breaking up the Olympic movement. The point of view is peculiar, because Russia has wiped the floor with the Olympic idea several times since the state doping program of the Sochi Winter Olympics and the sabotage of its research in 2014.
Of course, political controversies, boycotts and doping and corruption scandals are not new in the Olympic movement, whose history is full of conflicts. At the opening of the Stockholm Games in 1912, the Finns also deliberately walked apart from the Russians. In 1936, at the Summer Games in Berlin, the Nazis used the attention of the Olympians to their advantage. Since then, the Games have been overshadowed by, for example, the Cold War, South Africa’s racial segregation policy and China’s human rights problems.
OOver the years, the Olympics have also grown into huge construction projects, as one country after another wants the best and biggest for its games. In the worst case, expensive event venues have been left empty after the Games.
A lot has been built in Paris as well. For example, the new Olympic village will host thousands of athletes. The security measures are very strict, as the games are also subject to an obvious threat of terrorism. It is Europe’s biggest public event this year, which is followed all over the world. The opening ceremony will take place along the Seine River in the center of Paris, and an audience of 300,000 people is expected. More than a hundred foreign heads of state will arrive in Paris.
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Sports are still the number one thing at the Games.
The environment has also played its part. One of the winners is the Seine, which runs through Paris, whose cleanliness has become an important image factor for the city. Paris has been forced to invest in wastewater treatment, as the swimming part of the Olympic triathlon and the swimming marathon are to be held in the river. France has spent more than 1.4 billion euros on cleaning the river. Cleaning Seine is an achievement, because the river has been unswimmable for over a hundred years. There are still plenty of doubters.
S57 athletes from Uomo have been selected for the Paris Games. Finland’s youngest ever Olympic athlete, 13-year-old skateboarder Heili Sirviö, is included. Skateboarding entered the competition program at the Tokyo Games in 2021. Although the competitors take their performance seriously, the sports favored by young people bring much-needed relaxation and the joy of sport to the otherwise rigid games. This has also been done by snowboarding.
Finland’s expectations for the upcoming Games are moderate, because in recent years the Olympics have not been a shower of medals for Finns.
Sports are still the number one thing at the Games. For athletes, the games are an important opportunity to show their fitness and abilities among the best in the world every four years. The Paris Games now need an Olympic peace. The competitions also bring sports that are rarely televised to the viewers. There are more than 30 of them, and it’s exciting to see which new sport will become popular this year.
The editorials are HS’s positions on a current topic. The articles are prepared by HS’s editorial department, and they reflect the journal principle line.
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