During the 2024 Summer Olympics, it just so happened that I was living in Paris. Cool, right? Well, not if you asked any Parisian at the time. I love them, but they can be quite a negative bunch, and this proved especially true when it came to the Olympics. In anticipation of the games, they fled the city like an enemy force was about to invade. As a newly minted resident of Paris, I too took on this negative attitude, seemingly by osmosis. Maybe I just wanted to be included. 😂
To be fair, for the typical Parisian commuting to work everyday, there was a lot to be negative about. The Paris Olympics were unique in that they were truly IN the city. When the Olympics were hosted by London in 2012, the city managed to contain basically all of it in 1 giant park on the east side of the city. And they even built a custom train to get attendees into and out of that park without disrupting the flow of traffic in the rest of the city. Paris… *ahem… was different.
In Paris, the main event stages were literally in the center of the city. This required large portions of central Paris to basically shutdown for more than a month while the Olympics (and then the Paralympics) ran their course. And during that time, the security was intense. Each day had a different set of events which required slightly different areas of the city to be shut down and secured. It must have been a monster of an event to plan! But for those of you who watched this event on TV, it might have been easy to forget that people live here.
There was a website that showed exactly which parts of the city would be shut down at which time so that residents and businesses could plan accordingly. My office at the time was quite close to the Bir Hakim metro stop, and was thus nearly always within the security perimeter. In order to get into work everyday, I had to cross a police barricade. This required me to present official documents to the police and then surrender my backpack for a search. And they didn’t always like my documents, so occasionally I would have to walk an extra 6 blocks to find a different approach to my office. For those whose apartments were within the security perimeters, the app-based system that Paris had used to control people’s movements during COVID was reintroduced. This only affected my flat in the 2nd arrondissement over 1 weekend (during the Marathon), so I planned a trip and left the city that weekend.
So it should be easy to understand why so many locals fled during this time, but I should also note that the logistics of setting up and tearing down all the infrastructure was a beast unto itself that required weeks to months on either side of the start and end dates. Add all of that up, and Central Paris was partially shut down for at least half of 2024. The photograph above was taken in what is normally quite a busy intersection in Paris WEEKS before the Olympics even started. It wasn’t the greatest moment to be living in Paris. Parisians mostly go on holiday during this part of the summer anyway, so with the Olympics, the city was all the more empty for an even longer duration of time. I definitely did some moping that summer in that big, beautiful ghost town. To be honest with you, I wasn’t even sure if I’d attend any of the Olympic events…
THANK GOD I snapped out of that funk and bought some tickets! It was definitely a bad summer to be in Paris, but the opportunity to go to the OLYMPICS was one that I may never get again. I attended 3 events at the 2024 Olympics, and it was one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had. Let’s go through them in ascending order of coolness…
INDOOR Volleyball:
Poland 🇵🇱 v. Kenya 🇰🇪 (W)
This was the first Olympic event I went to, and the ticket came to me for free! A coworker had somehow scored 2 free tickets to the event, so we went to it. Shoutout to Soyoung! This particular event was taking place at the South Paris Arena, which was on the southern edge of the 15th arrondissement.
I did not care about volleyball at all… and I still don’t… but a free ticket to the Olympics? Yes please! I don’t care what the event is. And when we arrived at the stadium, 1 of 2 things turned out to be true… either (1) lots of other people had the exact same logic as me, or (2) a lot more people care about volleyball than I had realized! It was really an electrifying atmosphere!
In the oppressive heat of the Parisian summer, the rush of cool air when we walked through the arena doors came as a massive relief. Paris is not known for its AC, so I was a bit worried.
Inside the arena there were warm-up courts, and places where visitors could play volleyball themselves just to get a feel for what the actual competitors were experiencing… it was very cool! But the actual match was taking place in a temporary structure that was using every available centimeter of height available in this building. It was a bit difficult not to imagine these bleachers crumbling beneath us as we ascended to the top, outer edge for our *free* seats. But the bleachers held up.
So this was Women’s Indoor Volleyball: Kenya vs. Poland. We all stood for the national anthem of each country to be played, and then the game was off!
Indoor Volleyball games are played to 25, best of 3 games. Poland won all 3 games (25-14. 25-17, & 25-15) so we weren’t watching nearly as long as we might have been. But it was still fun. I think no matter who you are or what sports you prefer, watching any part of the Olympic games is (or should be) quite thrilling. For most sports, this is the top of the mountain! And I think that indoor volleyball is definitely one of those sports. For most of the people you see competing here… it would likely not be an exaggeration to say that their whole lives had led to these moments.
Beach Volleyball:
Spain 🇪🇸 v. Netherlands🇳🇱 (W)
USA 🇺🇸 v. Norway 🇳🇴 (M)
Up next… MORE VOLLEYBALL. But this time we’re seeing Beach Volleyball, which tends to be a bit more popular in the summer Olympics. But Beach Volleyball at the Paris Olympics was extra special, because of the insane location of the event. It was literally right in front of the Eiffel Tower. I remember seeing an Instagram story of the venue at sunset… it looked like a sports fairytale.
Well, it just so happened that this was also right next to my office, so in the dog days of summer when the office was all but empty, a coworker and I were able to take an extended lunch break to attend one of these events. Under the glaring mid-day sun, it was going to be HOT, but we suffered for a worthy cause. I just had to see what the police barricades I had been crossing to get to work all summer were protecting!
We saw 2 match-ups. In the first, the Dutch women (Katja Stam/Raisa Schoon) went up against the Spanish women (Daniela Alvarez/Tania Moreno). It was a close and hard-fought match, but the Spanish came out on top. Which makes sense. Spain has a lot more warm beaches than Holland. I can’t imagine the Dutch pipeline of beach volleyball talent is nearly as strong, despite their height advantages. Ultimately, the Spanish would finish in a 3-way tie for 5th, with the Dutch behind them in 9th.
The second match was the US men (Miles Partain/Andrew Benesh) vs. Norway’s men (Christian Sandlie Sorum/Anders Berntsen Mol). Norway won this match, and went on to win the Bronze medal overall. I was kind of surprised by this… because this is a summer/beach sport. How is Norway generating interest in this sport domestically when their beaches are rocky and covered in snow most of the year?? The US should be dominating this. But then again, the Norwegians are very tall. And the silver and gold medals went to Germany and Sweden respectively… so clearly my logic here that warm beaches = good beach volleyball players is extremely flawed.
THE MAIN EVENT: OLYMPIC SWIMMING!
Ok lets move on to a sport that I actually know a lot about: swimming! For me, this was the main event of the summer. I grew up swimming and was even an NCAA D1 swimmer throughout university—and you’d better believe it’s still on my CV! I lived and breathed this sport for 10 years of my life. Bragging rights is all I have left at this point, but I do still love the sport.
The hometown hero of the Paris Olympics was Léon Marchand, who won 5 medals in this Olympic Games alone. This makes him now one of only 3 men ever to win 4 or more individual medals in a single Olympic games, the other 2 being Michael Phelps and Mark Spitz, who are both absolute legends.
I remember a few nights before I went to see the swimming events in person, I was watching one of Marchand’s races late at night in a Parisian bar. I’ve been watching this stuff on TV since the 2004 Olympics in Athens, so it was surreal and exciting that—20 years later—I would be seeing this in person.
The pool for the Paris Olympics had been set up in La Défense Arena. La Défense is the part of Paris with all the tall modern buildings that—from the city center—can be seen from afar. This actually sits outside of the main 20 arrondissements of the Paris. The pool was was known to be a bit of a bummer because it had been built to be temporary, and was thus shallower than what would be ideal. If you’re not familiar with the swimming world, pools can be slow or fast. Generally, fast pools are deep pools. So the Paris Olympics was off to a slow start with regard to new records being set; this was definitely a slow pool. But there were still a few new records set! Here are the pictures of the approach through La Défense.
This was not a cheap ticket. Swimming is one of the premier events of the summer Olympics. I was attending solo and that was just fine, because I was on the edge of my seat the entire time! I was in the zone watching every little detail starting from the incredible light show that played just before the events began. That water was so calm during this opening number… after all my years of swimming, I just get this urge to dive in! Even watching the video back now, it’s like an itch. Like the urge to stick a knife into the smooth top of a freshly-opened jar of peanut butter.
I bought my ticket for the night of the finals for events that I myself used to swim. Specifically, I opted for the 200 backstroke. So here’s the schedule & results of what was to come. A quick note on how to read this - in the United States, we swim “Short Course Yards (SCY)” whereas in international competitions, the pool is “Long Course Meters (LCM)”. Let me break this down into its 2 parts for you:
“Long Course vs. Short Course” - “Long Course” means the pool is 50 meters across instead of 25 meters across. The Olympics and most other international competitions are swam “Long Course”, but all American competitions are “Short Course”. Short Course times tend to be faster because there are more “walls” and the fastest swimmers will ever go is in the push-offs from the wall.
Meters vs. Yards - This one is fairly obvious… for international competitions such as the Olympics, the unit of measure is Meters, whereas in American competitions, the unit is yards. That means that these two types of pools are literally different lengths. It’s not a huge difference… but at this level, it makes a massive difference. And I’ll help you with the unit conversions here: 50 meters is longer than 50 yards. So this is another reason was LCM times are slower than SCY.
So, you can actually convert the times from LCM to SCY. It’s not exact because it can’t account for the strengths and weaknesses of an individual swimmer, but it gives you an idea. Having been raised on SCY times, I have taken the liberty of converting all of these times so it’s a bit easier for my fellow Americans to understand how blazingly fast these times are.
Women’s 200 Butterfly [Finals] ⚠️
🥇🇨🇦 Summer McIntosh - 2:03.03 (SCY: 01:48.31) *Olympic Record! 🤯
🥈🇺🇸 Regan Smith - 2:03.84 (SCY: 01:49.04)
🥉🇨🇳 Zhang Yufei - 2:05.09 (SCY: 01:50.17)
Men’s 200 Backstroke [Finals] ⚠️
🥇🇭🇺 Hubert Kos - 1:54.26 (SCY: 01:40.77)
🥈🇬🇷 Apostolos Christou - 1:54.82 (SCY: 01:41.27)
🥉🇨🇭 Roman Mityukov - 1:54.85 (SCY: 01:41.30)
Men’s 50 Freestyle [Semifinals]
🇬🇧 Ben Proud - 21.38 (SCY: 18.54) → Went on to place 2nd in the finals🥈
🇦🇺 Cameron McEvoy - 21.38 (SCY: 18.54) → Went on to place 1st in the finals🥇
🇮🇹 Leonardo Deplano - 21.50 (SCY: 18.64) → Went on to place 7th in the finals
Women’s 200 Breaststroke [Finals] ⚠️
🥇🇺🇸 Kate Douglass - 2:19.24 (SCY: 02:01.83) *American Record! 👀
🥈🇿🇦 Tatjana Schoenmaker - 2:19.60 (SCY: 02:02.16)
🥉🇳🇱 Tes Schouten - 2:21.05 (SCY: 02:03.46)
Women’s 200 Backstroke [Semifinals]
🇺🇸 Phoebe Bacon - 2:07.32 (SCY: 01:52.54) → Went on to place 4th in the finals
🇦🇺 Kaylee McKeown - 2:07.57 (SCY: 01:52.76) → Went on to place 1st in the finals🥇
🇬🇧 Honey Osrin - 2:07.84 (SCY: 01:53.00) → Went on to place 7th in the finals
Men’s 200 IM [Semifinals]
🇫🇷 Léon Marchand - 1:56.31 (SCY: 01:41.90) → Went on to place 1st in the finals🥇
🇺🇸 Carson Foster - 1:56.37 (SCY: 01:41.95) → Went on to place 4th in the finals
🇨🇳 Shun Wang - 1:56.54 (SCY: 01:42.10) → Went on to place 3rd in the finals🥉
Women’s 4×200 Freestyle Relay [Finals] ⚠️
🥇🇦🇺 Mollie O’Callaghan / Lanni Pallister / Brianna Throssell / Ariarne Titmus - 7:38.08 *Olympic Record! 🤯
🥈🇺🇸 Claire Weinstein / Paige Madden / Katie Ledecky 👑 / Erin Gemmell - 7:40.86
🥉🇨🇳 Junxuan Yang / Bingje Li / Chutong Ge / Yaxin Liu - 7:42.34
Also in the pool for the 50m Freestyle semi-final was Caleb Dressel, who is one of the most famous American swimmers right now. On the night I saw him, he qualified for the final seeded 5th. He would go on to finish a disappointing 6th in the finals, but it was still cool to see him. The golden age of US men’s swimming seems to be over right now… it wasn’t long ago that we had Phelps and Lochte dominating the pool. Oh well. Here’s his race though. He’s in lane 1, which is the one closest to the camera.
But I’ll tell you what… seeing Summer McIntosh break the OLYMPIC RECORD in the 200m fly was pretty cool! And all the more impressive considering that it was in this slow-ass pool! Here’s a crazy fact for you: at the time of this race, she was 17 years old. Like, she was born in 2006. Wow I am getting old. She’s truly a generational talent.
Here’s a reel of all her individual events in Paris—but I’ve set it to drop you in right at the start of the 200 fly that I saw personally.
It was also super cool to see Katie Ledecky swim! She’s an absolute legend, and won her first Olympic gold medal at just 15! This was in the 2012 London Olympics.
ANYWAY, here’s a dump of all the pictures I took during these events…
One of the coolest parts of seeing this all play out in real life that you don’t see on TV is the interaction between the swimmers and the fans. If you can’t tell, all of this was shot on my phone, but this is where I was really wishing that I had my big camera, because there were some really cool moments between the Olympians and the young kids in the crowd who clearly just worshipped them. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the kids that was sitting in this arena is a future Olympian themselves!
It was also pretty easy to spot where the families of these swimmers were sitting, because they would often come over to the stands after their race to talk to them. In that way, it wasn’t much different than the meets I competed in growing up. Even at the Olympics, the parents were just buying tickets to watch with the rest of us. Swimming is a very small and unpretentious world.
Having been a D1 swimmer, it’d probably surprise you how few degrees of separation there are between me and a lot of the Olympics swimmers from the late 2000s / early 2010s. It even surprises me to be honest. That’s the magic of swimming in the US: it’s truly shocking just how many of the people you see swimming in the Olympics train in the US. As a result, US NCAA D1 championships is actually the hardest meet to qualify for in the world! Sure it might be more difficult to qualify for the Olympics from a nation like the US or Australia, but if I’d had a passport from an obscure country like Nauru, I’d have swam in the Olympics. NCAA D1 championships are where you get everybody competing for the exact same slots. So if the fastest 5 people in a particular event happen to all be from the same country, that’s who will be competing in the finals! Whereas, in the Olympics, probably only the fastest 2 of them would have been able to compete for their country. So American collegiate swimming is pretty cool, and will get you a lot closer to the “big time” than most people realize. And the fact that it’s SCY is pretty cool as well, because the speed feels kind of amplified compared to the Olympics.
That being said, there was a 0% chance of me qualifying for NCAAs. I was just happy to be involved. 😂
Anyway, take a slow scroll this gallery. There are some cool moments in here, albeit, captured on a less-than-stellar camera.
Seeing as this is probably the only time I’m going to get to write about swimming on this website, I just have to share the coolest race of all time. In the Beijing Olympics Games back in 2008, there was one race in particular that lives rent-free in the head of everybody in the swimming world: the Men’s 400m Free Relay.
Not that I needed the excuse, but it’s got some extra relevance to this article because the antagonist in this story, and ultimately, the butt of the joke, is France. They were heavily favored to win the 400m Free Relay. I remember the narrative in the media at the time was they had been pretty arrogant coming into that race… there was actually some public trash talk happening which, as I’m sure you can imagine, was infuriating in the context of Franco-American relations. But they had good reason to be confident: they had Alain Bernard and Fréd Bousquet anchoring their relay, who were—at the time—the fastest men in the world.
Meanwhile, the lineup of the US relay was Michael Phelps, Garret Weber-Gale, Cullen Jones, and… the hero of this story, old man Jason Lezak, who was the oldest person the US team at the time. I say that… but he was 32… which is how old I am now…
Well, coming into the final leg of this relay, when the US was trailing the French by a full body-length, Lezak jumped in and swam a mind-blowing 46.06 (SCY: 40.05) to out-touch Alain Bernard by just 0.08 seconds, which (supposedly) the closest this race had ever been. This relay split was the fastest in history, and remained so until the Paris Olympics, when China’s 19-year-old Pan Zhanle split a 45.92 (SCY: 39.92) anchoring this exact same event. Anyway, back to Lezak—I was never one to get super animated while watching sports, but I was watching this live and was screaming at the top of my lungs by the time this race finished. My swim friends will occasionally mention that they still go back and watch this race on YouTube to this day. Honestly, me too. And now you’re about to be part of this too!
If you want to get a feel for just how famous this race is, check out this video of Missy Franklin & Katie Hoff interviewing Cullen Jones. Swimmers will know exactly who all of those people are. In this video, Cullen Jones says—in reference to Jason Lezak’s attitude toward having been on the first American team ever to lose the 400m Free Relay in the Olympics in 2000 (they came in 2nd to Australia)… and then toward only placing 3rd in 2004—“‘bitter’ would be a nice way to put it.” 😂
Watch this…
F*cking legend.
Lezak will forever be the cover of my gym playlist. If you want some good gym-spiration, throw this bad boy on shuffle:
This was SO COOL! I sort of forgot that this is a travel website halfway through writing this article.
When we came out, it pouring rain, so we all had to wait for the weather to die down before making a run for the nearest metro station. Eventually I sprinted back off into the dark rainy night, and then I was in ✨Paris✨ again.
I’ll leave you with the track that was my ultimate pre-race pump-up song back when I was swimming. I would ration how frequently I listened to it so it would retain its magic for race time. So turn it up loud & enjoy. 💪
