UnEarth Magazine.

Words by Ali Quirk, Photography by Ellie Thorson.

Being chosen as the host of the Olympic Games is one of the greatest honors a city and country can receive. Through the rigorous selection process, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) evaluates candidates through a number of strategic and technical assessments. These include everything from judging the environmental and socio-economic context to the specific infrastructure and venue plans for the Games. Selection as an Olympic host therefore signifies international recognition of the economic, social, and environmental accomplishments, or more generally, the sustainability, of a given country. Yet while the IOC claims that “the Games should adapt to the host, not the host to the Games,” cities still massively transform, for better and for worse, to meet the incredible challenge of hosting.  

Intimately tied to the sustainability indicators considered by the IOC during host selection is a concern for their vision and legacy, asking how each city will fit into the broader goals of the Olympic movement, namely peace and development. The attention to legacy established in the earliest phases of planning gave me pause. Instead of athletic achievement, the legacy of each Olympics is somewhat predetermined through the carefully orchestrated spectacle that surrounds the Games. This drives constant competition amongst hosts to be the best Games yet, usually at the cost of sustainability and integrity.  

However, these legacies rarely go according to plan. This is perhaps most infamously noted by the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics who adopted an ambitious plan to adapt to the Games. At its best, the city made empty promises to its residents about repurposing Olympic venues as schools, and at its worst, as reported by Amnesty International, it endorsed a “new wave of police violence against favela residents” in the name of public security. Further, Rio followed the tried and true Olympic tradition, seen in Seoul, Beijing, London, and now Paris, of displacing poor communities for infrastructure development which will never benefit them. In Vila Autódromo, a favela of 700 families located adjacent to the Olympic Park site, residents were forced to relocate. Their community became a seldom used part of Rio’s Olympic history. Were they removed because the city needed the land or because favelas, despite their incredibly important role in Rio’s cultural heritage, were an ‘eyesore’ for tourists?  

One of the greatest incentives for hosting the Olympics is the global attention, which serves as the best tourism campaign one could ask for. Yet the role of the Olympics in boosting tourism is often used to justify extreme measures taken by hosts to make their cities as attractive as possible. Ahead of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, media coverage is swirling around the first ‘climate positive’ Games. Few, however, are calling out Paris’s many unsustainable preparations for hosting, such as the displacement of migrants in the name of ‘urban renewal’. Notwithstanding any of the environmental implications of the Olympic Games, the social and economic cost of hosting, seen in Rio and now Paris, seem enough to justify the wholescale cancellation of this and all other international sporting events for the sake of a sustainable future.  

However, this belief may lead the world astray from several other Sustainable Development Goals, such as reducing inequalities and achieving global wellbeing. Although the aforementioned displacement practices work against strides toward equality, the philosophy behind the Olympic movement of global unity is not one to toss aside without considering its benefits. Sporting events have tremendous power in mobilizing a healthy outlet for national pride and competition and for the global broadcasting of culture and heritage. In addition, they are important platforms in advocating for gender and disability equality. The unprecedented popularity of the 2023 Women’s World Cup and the 2022 Beijing Paralympics demonstrate that sports are on an increasingly inclusive trajectory, implicating social progress in the decision to eliminate these events.  

Ultimately, the repetition of some of Rio’s greatest atrocities in Paris shows that cities are not adequately deterred from using inhumane and unsustainable practices by the IOC’s current host selection process. The Olympics cannot go forward in their current form in a world that is truly sustainable, but the importance of international sporting events for global unity, culture, and wellbeing demands reform of the Games rather than total closure. One such reform includes rotating host cities to reduce waste and make use of preexisting infrastructure. However, researchers have found that by 2041, many previous Winter Olympic sites will no longer be “reliably cold enough for the Games.” Looking realistically at the future of the Olympics, even incremental reforms like these will take decades, if ever, to be applied. Therefore, the responsibility falls on us, the consumers, to demand change from the IOC, and until the torch is extinguished on the Paris Olympics, its legacy of sustainability still has room to change for the better.