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A day before the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics, are we, the grumpy French, excited about the Games yet? That’s the question our international friends and colleagues at The Conversation keep asking us time and again, and the answer is: it depends. Macron’s decision to call snap elections, which led to unprecedented gains for the far-right in peacetime, has left the country hurting and divided, so much that the French president has called for a “political truce” during this period.
But are the Olympics really the apolitical space we make them out to be? A team of French linguists has dug into the Olympic Charter and other historical texts to find that the values of equality and solidarity promoted are anything but neutral. In fact, organisers were actively invited to embrace the political nature of Olympism. Two other articles remind us this week of all that the French have to celebrate before the medals come in: achievement of gender parity, on the one hand, with an exactly equal number of female and male athletes competing for the first time in history; and
uplifting, ambitious climate goals, on the other.
Perched on Mount Olympus, the immortal Olympian deities didn’t tend to worry about death. Could it be that we channel more of them than we thought? Commenting on recent research, as well as his own experience with dying patients, clinical psychologist Mattias Tranberg reflects upon the mysterious phenomenon of happiness at the end of life.
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Julien Longhi, CY Cergy Paris Université; Arnaud Richard, Université de Toulon; Carine Duteil, Université de Limoges
Since July 2020, the Olympic Charter prohibits “any kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda”. But what if the Olympic project was in its essence political?
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Anne de Bortoli, École des Ponts ParisTech (ENPC)
Organisers of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games have made big and bold green promises. Are they up to the heavy carbon lifting?
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Olatz González Abrisketa, Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea
The modern Olympics were designed for men, and have gone to great lengths to exclude female athletes.
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Mattias Tranberg, Lund University
Finding fulfilment at the end of life is not that unusual.
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Ramón Ortega Lozano, Universidad Nebrija; Aníbal M. Astobiza, Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea; David Rodríguez-Arias, Universidad de Granada
Guiding people towards healthy choices can avoid more restrictive measures down the line.
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Tom Vickers, Nottingham Trent University
The recent ballot of GMB members at Amazon’s Coventry site gives useful insights into how to stand up to large employers.
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Francisco Javier Moreno Nuncio, Instituto de Salud Carlos III; Christopher Fernandez-Prada, Université de Montréal
Climate change is causing this disease to spread in Southern Europe, but governments are doing little to prevent it.
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Stefan Wolff, University of Birmingham; David Hastings Dunn, University of Birmingham
Abandoning Ukraine, withdrawing from Europe and pivoting to Asia will severely disrupt the principles on which Nato was founded.
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