Paris, Again
When Boston announced we’d be hosting the Olympics, I cheered.
“Can’t wait to ride my bike down to the Opening Ceremony,” I said to anyone who’d listen.
“You’re nuts,” Mary responded. “We’re going to rent the house and get out of Dodge.”
“What!?! This is going to be great,” I pleaded. “It will be unlike any Olympic Games, ever.”
“Ha! Not likely,” Mary’s and just about everyone else’s response to my unbridled enthusiasm.
This was 2015, almost ten years ago though it doesn’t feel like it. Mary proved right in her skepticism, and within a couple weeks of Boston’s winning bid for the 2024 Olympics the whole thing come crashing down as saner heads weighed in on the insanity of the proposed event. Temporary stadiums, open air Opening Ceremonies, use of existing venues all went poof on the heels of a particularly bad winter storm, which brought our famed T to a complete standstill, thereby immediately illustrating just how unrealistic the whole thing would be. No, Boston would not host a reinvention of the Olympics, but I like to think we helped inspire what’s about to unfold in Paris.
Starting tomorrow with a celebratory flotilla on the Seine, France will host an Olympics like none to date. This exactly one hundred years since the City of Lights last hosted three thousand athletes in seventeen sports. Over the next two and a half weeks, ten thousand athletes will compete in thirty two different sports, and this time half of them will be women where only a hundred and thirty five had been a hundred years ago. Ten million fans, including Mary and I, will convene on what is sure to be a security fortress. And yes, in the end, I will be riding my bike to various Olympic venues, not from my home town of Boston, but from where my family called home from 1963–68.
I learned to ride a bike in France. I learned the game of boule in France. I learned how to say whatever I needed to when living in Paris from age five to nine, our apartment just a few blocks from the Eiffel Tower, and where they have now erected a temporary stadium to host beach volleyball.
“We’re not going to that,” Mary first declared when I mentioned ‘beach’… until I told her where it was going to take place. “Cool!” her revised response.
In the early sixties, my brothers and I would ride our bikes around the Champs de Mars, free of the worries parents now harbor when letting kids play outside. We got ourselves to school by ourselves, or so I recall, Ecole Active Bilangue just a short walk across the park from Rue Charles Floquet where we lived. My dad working as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times. My mom working to keep her sanity in a strange foreign city, three young boys running around like lunatics.
This week, Mary and I return to Paris for the first time since having our own kids. It will be great, and it will be crazy. No one can predict what the games will be like, though many are trying. Most Parisians have run for the hills, or beach, but it’s August, so nothing new there.
“What events are you going to?” People ask.
“We’re choosing venues as much as we’re choosing particular sports,” our answer. We’re interested in seeing how this new format’s going to look and feel. We will sit on the beach beneath the Eiffel Tower. We’ll watch horses dance at Versailles. We’ll travel to the rowing venue east of the city, and we’ll sit by the river to watch athletes swim great distances. Lastly, and because this is the Olympics, we we’ll spend a day in the track stadium, as well as evening by the pool with Katy Ledecky. Most importantly, we’ll be in Paris where I learned to speak French and love pistachio ice cream.
Starting day after tomorrow, Mary and I will be in Paris for two weeks during our own anniversary. Both of us life-long athletes, so we’re visiting the city of love for the love of each other and of sport. For me, it’s a chance to return home. For the two of us, it’s a chance to be one with the culture. Yes, we want to cheer on some athletes — USA! USA! — but we also we want to walk the streets and speak the language — Vive la France! Mary and I both speak a bit of French, and have been having fun butchering sentences in preparation for our trip abroad.
Au revoir… for now. We will keep you posted, quite possibly with some French.
Que les jeux commencent!
