How the Paris Sustainability Plan Created an Olympic Class Divide (2024)

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There were three weather events that the organizers of Paris 2024 were dreading. Rain on the opening ceremony: check. Downpours that would overflow the sewers and foul the Seine: check. And a heat wave: check.

It’s 96 degrees in Paris today. The city’s cooling mist sprayers are in full effect. Cafés in the shade are full of fans with fans, and those in the sun are empty. The smells of the cheese shops and the Métro have converged. The shutters (on the older buildings) and roll-down blinds (on the newer buildings) are laid over the windows, as if this were a sleepy Mediterranean town during siesta hour, not the center of the EU’s largest metropolis.

It’s a high-profile test for the Olympics. Athletes will be competing in challenging conditions. Thousands of people are sitting in sun-soaked outdoor venues. At the afternoon beach volleyball session, in the Games’ most spectacular venue in front of the Eiffel Tower, red-faced fans lamented the heat: “horrible,” “crushing,” and “I’m from Australia, and this was hot as hell.” Stadium volunteers hosed down the crowd like a dusty infield.

Hot weather for outdoor sports is not particular to Paris. What is new this time around: Organizers opted to build the Olympic Village without air conditioning, a decision that has led to an embarrassing rebellion by rich countries determined to give their athletes the very best. As the Washington Post reported last month, the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, Britain, Germany, Italy, Greece, and Denmark all brought their own units to the party.

As the Australian Olympic chief put it, “We’re not going for a picnic.”

Even France has installed some air-conditioning units in its athletes’ shared spaces and gyms. Finally, the village decided to buy about 2,500 portable AC units that countries may order à la carte. You can see these units clearly from outside the buildings, since adapting the portable units to swing-open windows is awkward—a dedicated observer could even match up the AC-unit count to the flags that hang from every balcony.

By making AC a paid opt-in, the organizers risk exacerbating the preparation divide between rich and poor nations. At least one athlete, the Romanian table tennis player Bernadette Szocs, has claimed that her room is too hot.

On the other hand, I spoke to more than a dozen athletes, players, and coaches outside the Olympic Village on Tuesday, and no one seemed too bothered. Two members from Djibouti said that this was nothing compared with the heat they’re used to. Swiss triathlete Julie Darren, having lunch with her family at a boulangerie nearby, said her room was fine. Hazel Calawod, a coach and therapist with the Philippines gymnastics team, said the same—though some Filipino athletes do have AC. “I have no qualms about the heat because I’m from a tropical island,” she concluded.

“I was a little worried the day we arrived, because there’s been a big commitment to sustainability,” said Zambian team doctor Shula Chanda. “There’s no AC in the rooms, but there’s a fan, and it’s very cool.”

Several Olympians I spoke to were more concerned with matters of strategy. An American runner told me she had been training in Athens, and she thought the heat (outside) was good for her. An Uzbek doctor told me something similar: Uzbekistan gets hot, his team was used to such conditions, and this would play to the group’s advantage.

At the Olympic Village, the decision to use geothermal cooling—cold-water pipes running beneath the floors—was supposed to be a powerful symbolic gesture showing the sporting world’s commitment to the “greenest-ever games.” “I have a lot of respect for the comfort of athletes,” Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo told French public radio last year, “but I think a lot more about the survival of humanity.”

But it wasn’t a short-term publicity gambit either. After the Paralympic Games conclude in September, these buildings will become a regular neighborhood where thousands of people will live full time, summer after summer, without air conditioning. The directors have insisted that with geothermal cooling and smart use of the windows and shades (closed during the day, open at night), temperatures won’t rise above 79 degrees. Unfortunately for those models, Olympic athletes were not closing their shades on Tuesday.

It’s not an atypical setup for Paris, whose closest climate analog among American cities is Seattle. There simply aren’t that many days that require AC, even if that number is growing, and some combination of old building stock, high energy costs, and concern about the urban heat island effect has led policymakers here to discourage air conditioning as a climate change remedy. Instead, the emphasis has been on high-quality architecture—single-star buildings with cross-ventilated units, energy-efficient windows and materials, and blinds—and interventions in public space, like more shade and collective cooling spaces.

So what are you supposed to do when you get one of those days, like today, when the high temperature is 22 degrees above average? That’s when a real cultural difference emerges: In France, as in much of Europe, you’re just supposed to live with a little variation. Dress down. Sit outside. Leave town on vacation when the weather turns hottest. Or, as the Aussies from the beach volleyball match had concluded, get a cold beer.

Ultimately, that’s where Augustin Tran Van Chau, the deputy director of the village, concedes that there may be a difference between Olympic athletes and the rest of us. “The aim was to provide a very specific solution for athletes who are facing the match or competition of their lives … and who might have requirements for their comfort and recovery which are higher than in a normal summer,” he told reporters earlier this month, about the Olympic rent-an-AC program.

The good news is, the weather breaks tonight.

The bad news is, it may break with a set of thunderstorms that could threaten the signature achievement of these Games: a swimmable Seine river.