Tony Estanguet wants to talk about how the next Olympic Games, in Paris in 2024, will be a paradigm-shifting moment for an event that has come under fire for becoming too bloated, too costly, too onerous for the citizens of the places where the quadrennial sporting jamboree lands.
Estanguet wants to talk about sustainability plans, how 95% of the venues are already built and how measures are in place to ensure the budget of €7.5 billion ($8.8 billion) for the Games will not balloon when the event nears, as Olympic budgets have a tendency to do.
But all of that has to wait. The first task for Estanguet, the president of the Paris 2024 Olympic organizing committee, is to figure out how to plan an event for which preparations are likely to be affected by a pandemic now well into its second year. Estanguet brought dozens of staff members to Japan to shadow organizers of the Tokyo Games — perhaps the most complicated, strangest Olympics in history — and to learn how to take a layered plan years in the making and rewrite it on the fly.