A man holds a piece of paper showing a side-by-side comparison of a scene that took place during the Paris Olympics opening ceremony that seemed to evoke Leonardo da Vinci's 'The Last Supper,' during a protest near the French Embassy in Bucharest, Romania, Sunday, July 28, 2024. Paris Olympics organizers apologized Sunday to anyone who was offended by the tableau, which featured drag performers.Andreea Alexandru/The Associated Press
The general rule of crisis communications is three days: If you can muscle your way through 72 hours – five or six news cycles – you have probably escaped.
On the drag-queen Last Supper file, Paris 2024 couldn’t make it over the fence. The story would not die – mostly, I’m convinced, because the arresting visual made for high-quality video content that could be recycled endlessly. I guess that’s a sort of victory for the organizing committee.
But after its non-accredited, online defenders had thrown every sort of delusional justification at it – “It’s not Jesus. It’s Dionysus. The Greek guy. Here in France.’ – Paris 2024 was forced to (sort of) concede that it was Jesus.
“Clearly, there was never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group,” Paris 2024 spokesperson Anne Descamps said Sunday. “If people have taken any offence, we are, of course, really, really sorry.”
The problem isn’t that they did it. It’s their country and their party. They can do whatever they like. The problem is the word “clearly.”
If you are going to repurpose the sacred in order to use it for profane purposes, you have either set out to cause upset or are thick. Maybe a bit of both.
If upset was your goal, then say that: “To those amongst you who take offence, you can pound sand. We don’t care what you think.”
If you’re not going to do that, why bother being edgy in the first place? Because edgy isn’t the only thing that sells, but it does tend to prompt more than the usual amount of chitchat about your product.
We’re in a weird space in history where people have never been more willing to be outré in public, while at the same time more terrified of the slightest criticism. Everybody wants to stand out. Nobody wants to be cancelled. The conflicting pursuits are why The Daily Mail exists.
Among mainstream pursuits, that warring impulse causes the most friction in sports.
Sports are conservative. They are Saturday morning practices with Mom or Dad, enough money to pay for power skating camp and worrying about who’s going to make the basketball team, not that you might realign capitalism.
That’s how it works all the way up. I once went to an Alabama-Louisiana State university game in Tuscaloosa. I did not get the impression there were a lot of Thomas Piketty readers in the crowd.
But that impulse pulls the parking brake at full speed once you hit the pros. Now everybody wants a bit of that rock-star razzmatazz, which is essentially subversive.
Everybody wants to be Patti Smith, ignoring the part about how hard it was to be Patti Smith when Patti Smith was first doing it. If it’s easy to be Patti Smith, there’s no point in doing it. And yet.
This impulse is not holistic. They still do flyovers and salute the flag at games. They did flyovers and flag worship at the Paris opening ceremony, too.
But that’s not going to cut it for the people who will spread your work on YouTube and TikTok. You need to get them talking.
Celine Dion? Just right. Someone in a slinky red number as St. James the Great? Maybe a bit much. That’s how Paris 2024 ends up in this situation.
There’s nothing wrong with this, as such. The fastest-growing sport in the world since 2016 is politics. It’s inevitable that culture war issues begin to permeate our most traditionalist pursuits. But if you run a league, team or event, it’s a crooked path to walk. You’re always bouncing from one foot to the other.
Every big-time sport and sporting event must now decide: Are we leading the culture or trailing behind?
If you’re leading, then I’m waiting for your explanation for how you’re all in on universal equality, but that guy over there makes $50-million a year. Up the revolution.
As far as sports activists go, I can respect someone like Brazil’s Sócrates – a rabble-rousing, semi-drunken soccer genius who was also a qualified doctor, leftist agitator and newspaper columnist who helped topple his country’s junta. That’s the sort of subversion you can respect. The sort that doesn’t feel the need to say sorry.
Today’s version – a random athlete who’s all in on what they saw on Reddit last night, until Nike tells them to shut up and dance – is a poor facsimile.
As for what we saw on opening night in Paris, that’s an aesthetically striking smokescreen. Anything done in service of a multibillion-dollar spectacle isn’t edgy. It’s marketing. All of it. Every bit.
Despite the apology, Paris 2024 gets what it wants from this. They may by the end be called many things. On the ground, this has not been what you’d call a leap forward for sports organizational excellence. The transport’s been a mess. The venues vary in quality. There are more cops in some places than spectators. But whatever they are called, it won’t be “cautious.”
The half of the internet that celebrates thumbing your nose at the establishment will remember, while the half that doesn’t will move on to their next outrage.
It works the opposite way around in football and hockey – liberals routinely aghast, conservatives rubbing the flag in their faces. So it’s not like the balance is unfair.
Now that an apology has been delivered, we can begin the final stage of all sporting controversies: arguing over whether it was a controversy in the first place.
As a Catholic, I’m not offended by any of this. You don’t see anyone lampooning Scientologists and flat-Earthers. If you’re a target, you’re still on top. Like a great modern philosopher said, “You come at the king, you best not miss.”
Paris 2024 missed, but did so by design. The goal wasn’t to offend, or to include, or to achieve any tangible political outcome.
It was to get new customers looking in the shop window. That’s what advertising is meant to do.
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