Getting sports to people’s lives: how Paris 2024 is doing it!

The Paris 2024 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony is a couple of months away, but people have already begun to feel the joy and excitement of anticipating the biggest sporting event in the world.  

Festive and celebrating feelings are bolstered by both the underpinning notion of the Olympiad -which is the ultimate celebration of sports - and the events and promotions being organized in the host city, aiming at alluring everyone to get involved in what is expected to attract the interest of the vast majority of this planet’s population. 

The modern Olympic games have always had something of a festive nature. Ever since they were established, they were aimed at appraising sporting excellence, celebrating fair play, and elevating humanity. The Olympic spirit calls for creativity, innovation, equal opportunities, participation, and recognition of contribution all fitting into an event that gathers the top athletes of the world and attracts billions of viewers globally. 

Losing touch with the core values

In fact, the Olympics are getting so much attention, that their commercialization is largely inevitable. The Olympic Games is a money-making event. It is watched by billions of people from every part of the world, sells thousands of tickets to spectators and visitors, and generates millions of sports wagering revenues on betting sites in Lithuania and online sportsbooks all across the globe.

Some fear that the Olympic Games are actually losing touch with their core philosophy and deep-rooted values, especially as they have come to be more of a spectacle and a money-generating source and less of what they ought to be, which is no other than celebrating sports and promoting unity, solidarity, friendship, and education through sports. 

How is Paris 2024 doing it?

To address this, the Paris 2024 Organizing Committee has focused on revamping the promotion of the Olympic spirit, highlighting the importance of sports in all people’s lives, inducing participation and involvement by everyone, and fostering collective effort and immersion into the world of sports. 

In doing so, it has created the “Sport can change everything” campaign, which motivates every single person -professional athletes, legendary sportspeople, amateurs, sport-inactive individuals, and plain spectators- to get on board with sports. 

The idea is that sports offer people the opportunity to change in every possible way and every possible direction and all it takes is just to get on with it and become involved. You can be someone whose only association with sports is through betting on a UFC fight or someone who only watches big football games on TV, but no matter how involved you’ve been up to now, it is time to engage. That’s the spirit of the Olympics, promoted by the campaign.

Mercifully, this campaign has triggered a whole series of celebrating events and other campaigns launched by various organizations, including private enterprises that have taken upon the opportunity to promote their values and philosophies regarding sports celebration. 

Distance Running Store launched one such campaign, making an impressive statement and inviting people to rethink sports products and make them more about sports and less about fashion. With the “Rob it to Get it” campaign, the French retailer invited everyone at the store to pick up a product and try to steal it by running as fast as they could to avoid getting caught by the guard. Only, the guard was no ordinary guard. It was Meba-Mickael Zeze, the infamous sprinter whose talent has shone in the 100m and 200m races. The whole idea was to get customers to reconnect with the essence of sports. 

This was not the only campaign that made much sense within the context of preparation for the Paris 2024 Games. The Journée Olympique, the Paris 2024 Marathon Pour Tous, which is an open marathon where everyone is called to participate as well as other smaller scale events, along with the “Sports can change everything” central campaign, are all promising to bring sports closer to every single person in France.  After all, that’s the spirit of the Olympics. To have sports reach the daily lives of people and create a unique collective experience.