OLYMPIC GAMES OR CAROUSEL FOR THE CONSUMER

1. The 2024 Paris Olympic Games have opened.
2. We endured a long and rainy ceremony yesterday, more like a carousel in my grandparents’ “Parisian magazine” than the Olympic ideals of Pierre Frèdy, Baron de Coubertin and his International Olympic Committee of 1894.
3. The athletes passed, at full speed, piled up on barges of varying size, along the Seine, without being able to show off their bodies and their dresses designed for this feat.
4. Instead, we saw ad hoc inventions of fashion designers, the evolutions of ballet and gymnastics, we heard music, singers and rhythm in bulk and we saw divas in abundance.
5. Even among the many patriotic evocations of the French Revolution, the French Olympians, without the good manners of Parisians, laughed yesterday at Christ’s Last Supper, surely to annoy the few Christians who still swarm around ‘enlightened’ Europe.
6. Does the Conference of Bishops of France, which meets and lives in Lourdes, which has offered us its “Holy Games” presented in a concert in the form of a “French Mass” at La Madelene, have nothing more to offer or nothing to say?

Jaume González-Agàpito