The Paris Olympics are the greenest Games ever – and none of the athletes like it

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Have you heard that there isn’t protein in the athletes village? Because protein is vital to human survival, I might have prioritized that before funky mascot design.

But not at Paris 2024 – the greenest Games there have ever been. It’s basically a rain forest with a skate park.

Paris’s “food vision” for competitors included “two times more plant-based food” than previous Games. All the food is sourced in France. One-hundred per cent of it is certified. And nobody likes it.

“There are not enough of certain foods – eggs, chicken, certain carbohydrates,” Britain’s team CEO, Andy Anson, told The Times.

Now that competitors can complain directly via TikTok, Paris scrambled to solve the problem – promising an additional 700 kilograms of eggs and a ton of meat.

There are 10,000 people in the village, most of whom have metabolisms that run hotter than a jet engine. A ton of meat won’t last past lunch.

The other big complaint is the heat. None of the rooms in the athletes village are air conditioned.

Some countries, such as Canada, brought their own. Those who didn’t are now getting advice instead of relief from organizers – drink lots of water and keep the windows open.

Keep the windows open? Do the bigwigs at Paris 2024 live with Santa at the North Pole? Have they only ever read about how heatwaves work?

Paris 2024′s explanation for all of this is that they have tried to balance “a long-term objective to create a model sustainable neighbourhood” with the short-term objective of torturing their invited guests. They didn’t put it exactly like that, but that’s the untorqued version.

Every time you open the app that tells you how to take a Games bus to a venue, it advises you how much carbon you’d save if you walked.

For instance, if I’d hoofed it to the Place de la Concorde on Tuesday, when the sun was 20 feet overhead and the RealFeel was cresting 40C, I could have saved the planet 372 grams of carbon.

Additionally, because I would have died along the way, I would also have offered up a nutrient-rich, man-sized blob to feed Mother Gaia.

Am I angry that they won’t just hand me a bottle of water at any of the venues, but instead insist on pouring it into plastic cup (€2 deposit) first? No.

Does it make sense that in order to save the Earth from the scourge of plastic, you have now used two plastic containers to distribute one plastic container’s worth of liquid? Also, no.

I must stop. This amount of fuming produces unusual levels of CO2.

There is no such thing as a green sporting event. It does not exist. All that can be accomplished is a cheap, miserable sporting experience with a good excuse.

The climate crisis is real. We can agree on that. So why is the Olympics acting as though it’s imaginary? You can’t wish away continental bake in late-July because it would be better for ocean levels.

It’s either too hot outside or it’s not. ‘Open the windows’ is as good a plan against rogue waves is at it is against extreme heat.

Meanwhile, over at a hotel filled with Olympic bigwigs just north of the main press centre, the luxury coaches are lined up. Walk by an open bus door, and you’ll feel an Arctic blast coming off it good enough to cool a meat locker.

Green in the sports context means the little people visibly suffer in order that the steaks in the VIP suite taste even juicier.

When Formula 1 – the outfit whose major function is flying cars all over the world – tells you it is going net zero, you know this whole thing has passed beyond satire and into farce. But that’s old news.

What makes Paris 2024 unusual – admirable, even – is that it has exposed the truth of this.

Had they taken their green fantasies out exclusively on spectators and the media, no one would care. But in a gesture that has sparked a small climate class war, the athletes have been demoted to the status of plebs.

The U.S. men’s basketball team dwells in private luxury, while the Romanian table tennis team roasts.

You can see the competitors’ confusion in TikToks and Instagram reels. Cardboard beds? One egg per person?? Open the windows???

As much as history or glory, the allure of the Olympics is luxury. It is the peak of the mountain for competitors, and the trip of a lifetime for attendees. Getting ahold of a high-value ticket here is more of a status marker than driving a Mercedes. Because anybody can pay for a car, but only a real hitter knows someone who knows someone.

In Olympic circles, people continue to act like doping or politics are the Olympics’ most urgent problem. That what people want is clean Games and just Games.

That is provably wrong. The Olympics have been dirty for years, and run through with division, and the audience numbers at this first post-COVID version are spiking. As long as you have Celine Dion and Simone Biles, no one cares about that Iran-Israel judo match.

But this is the first time they have tried stripping away the employee perks to prove a climate point. My guess is that it will be the last.

The goal of big-money sport isn’t to solve the climate crisis. Its goal is to extend its involvement as a cause of it for as long as possible without any blowback.

So yank the air conditioning. Ration the cups. Claim to have reduced emissions by x, y or z per cent. Then send everyone home on a plane.

The shame of it – if there is any – is not that Paris 2024 has pulled this grift. It’s that regular people are still buying it.