Comment: The Paris Olympics are bad for planet and we must scale down

Sport is a good thing, right? It is healthy, wholesome and virtuous. It brings people together and gets the best out of human beings with only a few disadvantages. 

No wonder France – and in particularly Paris – is proud to be celebrating the Summer Olympic Games this month.

While I do not want to dampen anyone’s enthusiasm or ruin their enjoyment, I would like to suggest that we take time out and think about this with some detachment.

This is Paris’s Olympic centenary. For the 1924 Games, 3,000 athletes from 44 nations competed in 126 events. This year, 10,500 athletes of around 200 nationalities will take part in 329 events. 

They will be monitored by a vast baggage train of coaches, managers, health and fitness experts, assistants of all kinds and 20,000 accredited journalists. 

The Games will also require an exceptional intake of police officers, other security personnel, doctors, nurses, street cleaners and so on…

Is this really the 'greenest Games ever'?

And that is before we get to the spectators. Who knows how many people will descend on Paris for the duration? As many as possible, the organisers hope, spending and consuming as much as possible as they treat themselves to the high life away from home.

Paris, you understand, has to take one step further than its predecessors and show what it means to show off. That is how all major sporting events are these days: there is no prestige in holding back.

The organisers boast that this mass influx of people will not cause an environmental problem and that these will be the “greenest Games ever”. We should not be suckered by such hype. 

Everything we do today has an environmental impact and the more we do of what we want to do, the more resources we use and pollution we cause.

You can be sure that very few of the participants will arrive on foot or by bicycle. Some may take the train, but there are going to be far more journeys by plane, coach and car.

All these people need to be housed and fed. More than 600,000 meals will be served every day in the Olympic Village alone. The Games are going to consume a vast amount of food, not all of it from organic or conscientious agriculture. 

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Most of this food will have to be packaged. Too much of that packaging (and wasted food) will end up being dumped. You can be sure that not every can, bottle and burger wrapper will end up in its appropriate recycling bin. 

Most tourists are cavalier about their environmental footprint. Put a lot of them together and the abuse is magnified.

Let’s be honest, we are mostly talking here about an exorbitant use of fossil fuels and the production of a mountain of rubbish in addition to that which Paris normally produces. 

Even if the organisers are strenuous in their efforts to use renewable energy and recycle everything possible, they cannot control the actions of individuals who are enjoying themselves too much to think about what they are doing to the planet. 

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Surely the time has come to get real about the climate crisis and admit to ourselves that we cannot do whatever we want, even in the name of sport. 

Olympics should set standard

The Olympic Games stem from a noble tradition that inspires younger people to live healthier lives. They could make a contribution towards a healthier planet by setting an example of moderation. 

A truly modern Games would reject the razzmatazz; be smaller in scale; entirely carbon-neutral in all its aspects; and it would recycle 100% of its waste. 

The watchword of the world has to become “small is beautiful”. Sport should be helping to solve our problems, not adding to them.