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Paris 2024: a unique geoeconomic opportunity for France
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In 2024, the eyes of the world will be on Paris as the City of Light hosts the Summer Olympics for the third time. The global event is returning to its homeland, to the place where Pierre de Coubertin revived the Olympic spirit.
Expectations extend beyond nostalgia, current events or remembrance of the past. One hundred years after the VIII Olympiad, the Paris 2024 Games are about more than mere sporting excitement. They carry with them major economic stakes for more actors than the host city alone. An ideal opportunity to recall the growing importance of the geoeconomy of sport.
A high-stakes event for France, generating a multitude of opportunities
Paris 2024 is first and foremost a high-stakes event for France, and the reach of the Olympics will extend far beyond the Paris ring road. From Marseille to Tahiti, from La Concorde to Saint-Denis, from the Stade de France to the most far-flung of the Instituts Français, the Olympic spirit will be felt everywhere. The global celebration generated by major international sporting events transcends internal boundaries, be they mental, social or geographical. It touches every aspect and dimension of the country. Its impact and the hope it inspires extend beyond the sporting arena. Sport is a “total social fact”. Paris 2024 fully demonstrates this.
Sport and geoeconomics, an inseparable duo
Jean-Pierre Augustin explained in 2011 that “if sport has a hold on society, it’s because the economy has a hold on sport“. The French geographer was ahead of his time. Sport and economy are an inseparable duo. Since the 1980s, and even more so with the collapse of the communist model, sport moved to a new dimension. Today, it is an essential facet of globalisation processes and their evolution. Joseph Nye named sport as an element of America’s soft power and a vector of its hegemony. The powers that be have understood this.
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