The Olympic Games: An Opportunity to Establish Sustainability
For centuries, Parisians have dumped sewage into the picturesque Seine River, making it unsafe for swimming. A $1.5 billion cleanup ahead of the 2024 Olympics was supposed to fix the problem. But as the closing ceremonies approach, the river is only partially safe for swimming. Last week, four athletes—two from New Zealand, one from Belgium and one from Switzerland—suffered from gastrointestinal illness after competing in its waters.
But is it really that bad? From Beijing’s air pollution cleanup in 2008 to the partial cleaning of the Seine River in 2024, the Olympics’ environmental mega-projects have always been ambitious but never delivered. Even when they succeed, they still improve the environment in some way, and provide a positive example for future Games and cities. Too often, the modern Olympics have served as a convenient excuse for expensive, environmentally destructive infrastructure. Stadiums and other sporting venues are the most obvious examples, but everything from highways to athletes’ villages is equally common.
After the festivities were over, the new construction was often underused and even abandoned. This was a persistent and embarrassing problem that grew as the scale and cost of the Games grew. But in 1988, things began to change. That’s when the small town of Lillehammer, Norway, won the right to host the 1994 Winter Olympics, and quickly embraced the idea of making them sustainable—with the encouragement of environmental activists.
For example, the facilities were built to be energy efficient with post-Olympic use in mind. These were modest efforts by today’s standards, but the competition that year changed the way hosting assignments were won, and it is now widely regarded as the first “green” Games. Since the mid-1980s, the Chinese government has openly aspired to host the Olympics.
Still, it wasn’t easy. Among other issues, Beijing had some of the worst air pollution in the world. So to win the rights to the 2008 Summer Olympics, China promised an ambitious $12 billion cleanup of the city’s smog that included closing and relocating factories, switching to cleaner fuels, and imposing traffic restrictions. The strategy worked during the games. Pollution levels dropped sharply, and skies that had been gray and hazy for a generation were suddenly clear and blue. But then the temporary nature of many of the initiatives was exposed when the pollution returned. Was this a glaring example of environmental deception? Yes.
Yet it turned out to be more than that. In Shanghai, where I lived in the years before and after the Olympics, citizens reminded each other that the Games proved that smog could be cleared if the will was there. By the early 2000s, there was intense popular political pressure on the government to fix the problem permanently. China, through its Olympic initiatives, gained the knowledge and policies to do so. In 2013, five years after the Olympic flame was extinguished in Beijing, it announced a national air-cleaning plan, adapting many of the technologies used in Beijing 2008. Today, China’s air is much cleaner than it was in 2008. Beijing, in turn, now serves as an example for other emerging cities battling air pollution.
Beijing might not have finally addressed these issues had it not needed to convince the IOC and a global television audience, but without them, it would have taken much longer. It’s a pattern that has been repeated at other recent Games. In 2016, Rio promised huge improvements in transportation and clean water, which have only partially materialized. But had there been no Olympics, the standards would never have been set. Today, some of the water is cleaner, there are new transportation links, and—most important—the public expects better.
Now it’s Paris’s turn. The desire to turn the sewage-filled Seine into a swimmable waterway dates back to 1990, but it wasn’t until Paris won the Olympic bid that there was enough political and financial support to make it happen. Yet despite spending more than a billion dollars, the success has been only partial.
Heavy rain can overwhelm the new system, making it unsafe for swimming (let alone triathlons), and athletes have complained about objects still floating in the water. The fact that the Seine is safe even part of the time is a huge improvement that will benefit Paris and its environment long after the Games are over.
Better yet, Parisians are unlikely to let the government simply stop working on improving the Seine once the world turns to other host cities for new Olympics.
*Writer specializing in Asian affairs.
Published by special arrangement with The Washington Post Licensing and Syndication Service.
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