My daughter was born in Paris the day the Eiffel Tower caught fire.
It was a steamy late-July, 21 years ago. Smoke billowed from the tower’s topmost observation deck. A historic heat wave was gathering, and by the time it crested, over the next few weeks, Paris’s most iconic structure wasn’t the only casualty. About 15,000 people died in France that summer, many of them elderly Parisians.
There’s not much air conditioning in Paris, not by American standards anyway. Few Parisian apartment buildings have central air conditioning; in many, box units won’t fit in windows that swing open like doors.
And even as temperatures have climbed in recent summers — the mercury hit 108 five years ago — plenty of Parisians remain stoic, regarding air conditioning as a climate-crushing indulgence favored mainly by whiny Americans. (I’ve learned that lesson the hard way.)
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So don’t imagine that it was callousness or cost-cutting that prompted organizers of this summer’s Paris Olympics to build housing without air conditioning for the approximately 15,000 athletes and officials expected next month, plus the 9,000 Paralympians who are set to arrive in August. It was entirely intentional, and now they are facing the blowback.
U.S. sports authorities, having deemed the likely indoor temperatures at the Olympic Village unsuitable for athletes, are bringing their own AC units for the hundreds of American competitors and officials headed to the Games. So are other nations, including Australia, which knows something about summer heat.
They have concluded that the Olympic Village’s eco-friendly cooling system, which relies on wind circulation and water drawn from deep underground, is inadequate to the task. World-class athletes, they are convinced, need more comfortable quarters.
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The Village’s designers insist that their “natural” air-conditioning system will keep the mercury from rising much above 80 in most apartments, most of the time. Their project is intended not only for the Games but for the long haul; after the athletes go home, the 125-acre site is to become a zero-carbon neighborhood of apartments, offices and shops.
The short-term problem — meaning the Olympian problem — is that the apartments housing the athletes are designed to be more or less comfortable assuming “normal” summer weather. As we all have figured out, there is no normal anymore when it comes to the weather. Last year, France suffered through its hottest late summer ever.
This paradox has been on organizers’ radar for a while. They are unmoved.
“I have a lot of respect for the comfort of the athletes, but I’m thinking even more about the survival of humanity,” the Socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, said last year amid criticism of the plan.
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Hidalgo took office in 2014. Her admirable crusade has been to make the city carbon-neutral by 2050, a massively ambitious program involving hundreds of miles of new bike lanes, a huge expansion of pedestrian and green areas, and a nightmare for people who still want or need to drive around town. (Ask a Parisian taxi driver about the mayor, and prepare yourself for a rant that will last for the duration of your trip.)
Hidalgo, for whom it is a point of pride that the Paris Olympics will be the greenest ever, has also been among the leading boosters of the Games’ other bold (read: possibly insane) environmental gamble: a plan to stage some of the aquatic events in the Seine.
The river’s soupy water has been too toxic for Parisian swimmers for a century. But a $1.5 billion Olympic cleanup, featuring a subterranean cylindrical drum that can store 20 Olympic swimming pools’ worth of contaminated rainwater runoff, was supposed to make it safe.
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Undaunted by fretful skeptics, the mayor announced months ago that she would take the plunge herself. She would show the world what marvels French engineering had achieved. Foolishly, perhaps, she set a date: this past Sunday.
So far, not so good. The new runoff basin and other new infrastructure have been outmatched by the higher-than-expected fecal bacteria levels enabled by a wet, gray spring. A few days ahead of her scheduled swim, the mayor prudently postponed it, a victory of self-preservation over civic pride.
The non-air-conditioned Olympic Village and the sump-ish Seine are cautionary tales. In both, authorities sought means by which they could overcome the damage mankind has inflicted on the planet — carbon that has overheated the air, pollutants that have fouled the river.
Both ventures are brave wagers. Both are subject to the planet’s climatic vagaries. A hotter-than-normal summer means athletes without bring-your-own-AC will broil. A few heavy rains and the Seine is a cesspool.
The Paris Olympics might still catch a few weather breaks between now and the Opening Ceremonies on July 26. In the meantime, salute the audacity of the Games’ organizers, and — this is for the American television audience — maybe turn up your thermostat by a few degrees. You’ll survive.
