Already, and this is the Daily Oh, this is the Daily ohs oh, now it makes sense.
Good morning, and welcome to the Daily Os. It's Wednesday, the twenty fourth of July. I'm Zara, I'm emma, just days out from the Olympics opening ceremony, thousands of athletes and descending on Paris for two weeks of competition.
Paris had the better part of a decade to prepare for this moment after it won a bid to host the twenty twenty four Olympics and Paralympics, but recent political instability, rising crime rates and temperatures, concerns of over tourism, bed bugs, and even e coli in this seen has left people asking is Paris ready. We'll explore that question in today's deep Dive, but first, Zara. What's making headlines?
US Vice President Kamala Harris has secured enough support within her party to be named the Democrats presidential nominee. It means that Harris is almost certain to be confirmed as her party's candidate at next month Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Comes after President Joe Biden announced he was withdrawing from the race against Donald Trump for reelection. In a statement Harris said she fully intends to unite her party nation and defeat Donald Trump.
In November, animal welfare authorities have shut down Tasmania's biggest puppy farm. More than two hundred and fifty dogs and puppies were surrendered to the RSPCA after a labradoodle breeding facility was accused of overbreeding its dogs for nearly two years between twenty twenty one and twenty twenty three. The breeders faced fines of up to two hundred and seventy three thousand dollars for the breach, but agreed to shut
down operations and hand over hundreds of labradoodles instead. The RSPCA is now seeking to rehome the puppies, and Dad has launched an appeal. It's also appealing to the Tasmanian government to overhaul legislation to prevent puppy farms from overbreeding.
The chief executive of CrowdStrike, which is the cybersecurity firm responsible for last week's global IT outage, has been called to testify in front of US lawmakers in Washington. CrowdStrike says a failed software update led to widespread outages in what's been called one of the world's biggest IT disasters. US House leaders want the CrowdStrike boss to face questions about how this incident happened and the mitigation steps CrowdStrike is taking.
And today's good news. A ninety eight year old physicist has received an honorary doctorate seventy five years after making a breakthrough discovery in particle physics. Rosemary Fowler was a researcher at the University of Bristol. Her nineteen forty eight research contributed to her supervisor, Cecil Powell, winning a Nobel Prize for physics in nineteen fifty. Fowler left UNI before finishing her PhD so she could support her young family during post World War two food rationing. Now she's been
honored in a private graduation ceremony. Bristol University's chancellor said, Fowler's intellectual rigor and curiosity paved the way for critical discoveries.
And it feels like we have been waiting a very long time for this Olympic and Paralympic Games to actually begin. I know it's only been three years, but it's like the only time I ever focus on sports, or it feels like a lifetime. But this week the Paris Olympics finally.
Begin, yeap, And I think that's a sentiment a lot of people can relate to, who might not love sport but love the Olympics. So there were plenty of headlines in the lead up to the twenty twenty Olympics in Tokyo, which were famously delayed until twenty twenty one thanks to the pandemic. But the Paris Olympics have had their fair share of headlines too, in the lead up to this week's opening ceremony.
And so I think that you know, for a viewer or certainly someone that's not competing, so you turn on the TV, you get excited, you watch it, and then it ends. Obviously, in real life it has a lot more of a tale than that. It's a very long process to get to the Olympics, and at least for the host nation to get to the Olympics. Where did this Olympic journey start? For Paris?
Well, like any country who wants to host the Olympics and the Paralympics, the conversation begins many many many years before the games themselves. France formally put forward itself as a candidate to host twenty twenty four in twenty sixteen, so presumably conversations were had in the years leading up to that point. They put a formal bid in and France won that bid in September twenty seventeen, at the same time that La was named as host for the twenty twenty eight Games.
And presumably the logic behind giving such a long kind of lead in period is because of how long it takes to prepare for an Olympic Games.
Exactly, and there is a lot to prepare for from a financial and infrastructure standpoint alone. There is so much to do. Cities have to transform themselves to accommodate all the events in appropriate stadiums and sporting facilities. Plus we've got the Olympic Village where athletes are housed during the Games. Plus transport infrastructure has to be managed to deal with the influx of spectators. We've got safety and security expenses.
Whether or not a city actually has these requirements already, or has the capacity to build these requirements or to meet these requirements is a major consideration for the committee.
Who decides who gets to host.
So the International Olympic Committee, before they say yeah, Paris, You've got the Games, they look at the kind of structure set up within a city already and its capacity to meet the demands of hosting.
It all sounds very expensive, you know, when you're talking about having to build this infrastructure from scratch in some scenarios, and it really reminds me of when we were talking about Victoria pulling out of the twenty twenty six Commonwealth Games that was of course announced by former Premier Daniel Andrews around this time last year.
Six to seven billion dollars is well and truly too much for a twelve day sporting event. I will not take money out of hospitals and schools in order to fund an event that is three times the cost as estimated and budgeted for last year.
The Commonwealth Games is a smaller version of the Olympic Game, So what do we know about how much hosting the Olympics and the Paralympics costs?
As you mentioned with that Commgames example, the financial burden of hosting these sorts of global sporting events is really being discussed more and more, and of course the Commgames are a smaller event, but that decision by Dan Andrews and Victoria to pull out of hosting actually inspired a
study into this exact matter interesting. Oxford University published these findings in May and they said the Tokyo Olympics, the Olympics, not even the Paralympics, cost around twenty billion Australian dollars.
Just to drop in the ocean, just to drop in.
The ocean, and researchers really wanted to investigate this financial spend and the financial risk of these mega sporting events. It noted that the last three Summer Games overran budgets by one hundred and eighty five percent. Now that's not even including road, rail, airport, hotel and other infrastructure, and those factors can often cost more than the games themselves, these researchers found. And this is not a new problem.
When we look back over the decades. Montreal, a Canadian city, hosted its Summer Games in nineteen seventy six and took thirty years to pay off their stadium. Some of our listeners might remember headlines from the Rio Olympic.
Games say that's the one that I remember.
Yeah, that was the first time that it really stood out to me kind of the scale of the burden on these cities to get ready. And yeah, you might remember vision of stadiums that were high builds or not yet ready or didn't have proper electricity you're plumbing, you know, weeks out from the games. So there is a lot of pressure on these cities.
There's a lot of pressure. But presumably the upside is, of course, all of the tourism that comes to that city for the three weeks of the Olympics and then the Paralympics. But balancing that and understanding at the end whether it is a net positive or a net negative is obviously something that needs to be weighed up. I want to go back to Paris specifically though, because I think this is a really unusual game in that it's
happening against a fair bit of political uncertainty. You and I have spoken about this on the pub before, but can you just at a very high level tell us about the context in France right now.
Yeah, So these games come at a time of huge political uncertainty after a recent election in France, which is also managing a summer game set during you know, record high temperatures and controversy in the headlines relating to this project to clean up the river. There's a lot going on in the city of Paris at the moment. So a quick refresher on that political uncertainty. There was an election.
The left wing coalition that was formed during that election won the most votes, but the election resulted in a hung parliament, so we had a kind of even split between the left, the center and the far right alliances. It wasn't a presidential election, so Emmanuel Macron's job is safe, But this divided result really means that there is no clear majority winner, and negotiations are still continuing between the parties as to what the future government of France is
going to look like. Most recently we saw a deal between Macron's party and a right wing opposition party, but who ends up controlling the government is still a far away from being determined.
And I remember when we spoke about the election results, we spoke about the fact that the French PM, Gabriella Tall, had handed or offered his resignation, but there was a chance he would stay on because of the Olympics. What's happened there.
Yep, So he did resign as PM in the wake of the elections. He's part of Macron's Ensemble party, but Attil suggested that he could remain in office throughout the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games to maintain government, and we ended up seeing President Macron ask him to do just that.
So Atle has stuck around. He's going to handle day to day business until the new government is named, according to French officials, and there will be voters who interpret this as, you know, a show of stability for the nation while it's under such an intense spotlight with the games in Paris.
Okay, So I think that gives us a bit of insight into the political context in which these games are playing out. But you also mentioned a few other very very specific Paris concerns, like the riversen. This is a strange one, and I must say I think I missed the beginning of this story or I came in late. Everyone knew about this, but me, what is happening here?
Look, in order to answer the question is Paris ready to host the Olympics, we have to address another concern, which is why have people been threatening to shit in the seen?
No one can ever ever accuse us of not doing both highbrow and lowbrow content on this podcast. Yep, very important question.
Investigating the important matters here are the daily os so one of the biggest challenges that Paris has faced in the lead up to the Olympics has been all about cleaning up the River Sen. So this is the river that runs right through the heart of Paris out to the sea. If you've ever been to Paris, you can't miss eral.
It looks it doesn't look great.
The river has been scheduled to stage some open water swimming events for the Olympics, so that means people competing in the water as well as being the site of the official opening ceremony. So that takes place Friday night local time Saturday morning, very very early for us here in Australia. But that's all going to be set along the Sin and athletes will be on barges and boats going down the river. So the problem with the Sen and the lead up to this point is about pollution yea.
So it's been illegal to swim in this end for just over a century because of this pollution concern. But when Paris was announced as the host of the Olympics, the government committed one point four billion euros or just over two point two billion Australian dollars to clean it up in time for the Games.
That is no small task. As I said, if you've seen it, you understand what we're dealing with here and have a bit of a visual queue. The big question, of course, is is it ready so.
Bacterial tests from as recently as June found traces of E. Coli, which rattled a lot of people and athletes and commentators and critics of this big cleanup project. Essentially, the finding showed the river was still too polluted to host swimming events. An official in Paris acknowledged that it wasn't up to pa. They blamed recent heavy rain on impacting the results, maybe skewing the data. But a group of fed up local residents planned a protest against the public money that was
being spent on this cleanup. They said that money could have been better spent on easing cost of living pressures on social issues, and when these findings of E. Coli came out of that test in June, they said, no, we've had enough. We're going to protest in the form of defecating in the river. Those plans ended up.
This is where I came into the story with zero context.
A lot of people probably came in at that point. Those plans ended up being stalled, and it seems like protesters have eased off on that threat to the relief of many, I'm sure.
And then last week we had the Mayor of Paris swimming in it.
Yeah, so in an effort to convince locals, to convince Olympians and the world, really, we saw the Mayor of Paris swim in the seen herself. Last week. Mayor and Hidalgo pledged that it would be safe to swim in for the Olympics, and she put her money where her mouth was and she jumped on in. She tried to prove that point. I haven't heard any news of her getting sick from that swim. She did look pretty happy while she was prancing around in the sense. So, for all intents and purposes, it's clean.
We've just received a very clear scientific analysis from Emma Glaspie here at the Daily Ohs. The sin is clean. You have nothing to worry about. I want to keep moving on because, as we've already touched on, there are a couple of elements to this question of whether or not Paris is ready for the Games. You know, on the one hand, we've got the political context, and another we've got the river sen But then there's also another element that I've started to see getting a lot of
coverage recently, which is about security and safety. You know, obviously the Olympics and the Paralympics are these huge moments of people gathering, and so is Paris prepared in that respect.
Yeah, there's been a lot of international attention on this factor. In particular when we look at the kind of local response in Paris from police. There's been a crackdown on local crime in recent months that's really been about trying to sort of clean up areas of Paris that will be on display for certain events, because there are going to be events right around the city, not just in the middle of the CBD, but that's actually been attributed
to causing overcrowding in Paris prisons. So there's a whole set of social issues from that crackdown. In terms of security more broadly, and when we're talking about the thread of terrorism. Obviously there are safety concerns with any international event of this nature, but there are some sort of standout quirks to the Paris Games in particular that will
require extra security. So that includes you know, this opening ceremony that we've touched on, it's going to be outdoors and Olympic opening ceremony has never been held outdoors, so that's unprecedented. And there's also a bunch of stadiums that have popped up as kind of temporary venues. A lot of them are open air. They're being built around the city.
Because of their temporary nature, their kind of security capacity is a little bit untested, so there is some concern around, you know, the pressure that they will place on officials to keep everyone safe. The president of the Paris twenty twenty four organizing Committee said that every moment of the Games, right from the opening ceremony to all the competitions, has a quote specific plan to guarantee the security for all
the accredited persons and the spectators. We can absolutely guarantee that security was the priority for Paris twenty twenty four, and from this base we will build the concept of celebration. So there's also an exclusion zone around the sin. Anyone in that zone needs to be properly accredited and be able to show accreditation. We can also expect to see
international security from competing countries. They will often bring their own security and there'll be a ramped up presence of security at places like local train stations and on the streets. In terms of numbers, to give you a sense of the scale, we're talking about around fifty five thousand soldiers, police, other law enforcement and military personnel during the Games in Paris.
Fifty five thousand sounds like a lot, but when you factor in that they'll be tasked with keeping more than ten thousand athletes and million of spectators safe, you know it's no small job.
And before we wrap up, I have been reading a lot of headlines about record heat waves in Europe and of course the Paris Games are being held kind of in the heat of summer. Is that something that's concerned for these Olympic Games.
Yeah, it definitely is, and it's a growing concern for the Summer Olympics as a concept. More broadly, there is a new report that actually flagged these games, the Olympics and Paralympics could be the hottest in history. That's after record high temperatures in Tokyo at the last Games. And these findings came from an Australian athlete led conservation group called front Runners and the British Association for Sustainable Sport.
So that report warned that athletes in these conditions in high heat, risk cramping, exhaustion, injury, heat stroke, disruption to their sleep patterns that could affect their ability to compete, and you know, in the worst case scenario, even the risk of death from competing in severe heat. So temperatures in Paris at this time of year are forecasted to reach or exceed the mid thirties and the Paralympics, which
are set for the beginning of September. You know, that might sound like it's out of the summer period, but it could very well also be affected given what this report described as the past precedent for heat waves to hit France later in the summer. Athletes have also raised concerns about a lack of air conditioning in the Olympic village. This story made headlines a little while ago, but organizers
actually ended up backflipping on that. So after this sort of initial plan of a really sustainable athletes village that would not have air conditioning, news dropped earlier this month that two five hundred temporary cooling units would be installed, so I'm sure a lot of athletes relieved about that. In a press conference this week, the IOC president Thomas Buck said the Games would still be quote more sustainable than ever.
I can tell you Paris is ready than ready, and we all can prepare for spectacular Olympic Games here in Paris.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily os. If you want more news and updates from Paris, sign up to our Daily Sport newsletter. We will throw the link in today's show notes over the Olympics. It's going to be a seven days a week update on everything you need to know, written by one of our incredible journals, and you'd be still in a mess it. Sign up via the link in our bio and we'll see you again tomorrow.
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bungelung Calcoton woman from Gadigol Country.
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