Olympic rings are set up at Trocadero plaza that overlooks the Eiffel Tower in Paris, on Sept. 14, 2017.Michel Euler/The Associated Press
We’re nearing six months out, so it’s time to start sounding the warnings over Paris 2024. Give it a few weeks and the International Olympic Committee will be ready to put out a compilation album: Red Flags: A Few of Our Favourites.
The latest comes from Sebastian Coe, four-minute miler turned track czar. To fill out that résumé, you have to demonstrate your understanding for the concerns of little people. Coe’s chosen the cost of tickets as his issue.
The evening track sessions, featuring the sexiest sprint finals, are the definitive Summer Olympic highlight. The event will take place at the Stade de France, a grim concrete pile on the outer rim of central Paris. Track ends in the small hours of the morning. All I can say is book that cab in advance.
Still, it’s priced like dinner directly underneath the Eiffel Tower. Bad seats are going for $250. Good seats – what I’d call decent seats if you’d like to watch the competition on the ground rather than on the Jumbotron – go as high as $1,500.
In a presser this week, Coe complained about it, which was really a way to toot his own horn.
“In Budapest [at the 2023 World Athletics Championships], we had very affordable tickets,” Coe said.
True, sort of. Attendance was cheap at those championships. But that was directly related to the previous world championships in Oregon, where only a fraction of the tickets were sold. The only thing worse than losing money at sport is appearing unpopular. Budapest was a reaction, not a correction.
To this point, reasonable people would agree with Coe. Certain things are depressing when empty – sports stadiums, restaurants, my glass the minute I walk in the door at your place. The first goal of any event organizer is packing the place.
But having warmed to his turn as a jogging Friedrich Engels, Coe kept talking:
“There are always going to be premium tickets, but it is important that our stadiums are full of people who love our sport, not people that can afford to get to an Olympics.”
Are the people who love your sport being given discount hotel rooms? Are you calling their employers: ‘Seb Coe here. You know me. Well, okay, fine, just Google me then. Anyway, wanted to let you know that Mary will be off for most of July because she loves the pole vault.’
Only one type of person travels to the Olympics (or the Super Bowl, or the World Cup, or any major final, etc.) – a big-game tourism hunter. Someone with a whack of cash, a ton of free time and a deep need to impress strangers at parties.
Growing up, I didn’t know a single person who’d vacationed in Italy. Now I don’t know anybody who hasn’t. When you have that conversation, it usually degenerates into a series of complaints about how hot, packed and overrated Rome is.
Vacations do not make you special any more. Nobody cares if your room overlooked the Spanish Steps. Museums in Europe differ from ours in that they are always good, often free and usually packed. No cultural capital to be earned there either. It’s getting harder for the North American striver to show off.
We continue in this illusion that sports is for the people. It is, but not the version that Coe is talking about. That is for aristocrats. Live attendance at premium sports is to the 21st century what opening night at the opera was to the 19th – a way to separate the people who matter from the ones who don’t.
Outrageous pricing isn’t an impediment to the mission. It is the whole point.
On vacation a few years ago, I went to a couple of soccer games.
At Chelsea, we sat so high in the rafters that getting up there qualified us as honorary sherpas. Those seats cost more than $300 a piece. Boring match, couldn’t see a thing, wished I’d watched it in a bar instead.
Then we went to Queens Park Rangers. About $40 a ticket. I actually think it was less, but I’m guessing high because I can’t remember exactly.
We sat pitchside behind one of the goals. So close that you could see the mist rising in Junior Hoilett as the home fans berated him with ‘You dooooon’t deseeeeerve your wages.’ So close you could see how violent a game top-tier soccer is. Highly recommended.
When you get home and people ask how it was, you know the rules – keep it short, use examples that elicit maximum envy: “Amazing. Lunch at Quo Vadis, pints at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, went to a Chelsea game.’
Not so long ago, spending a cheap afternoon at an English soccer stadium let people know you were a hyper-testosteroned oddball, possibly one with fascistic leanings. Now it costs a fortune and lets rivals and potential mates know that you are a man of means and discernment.
The balance is precarious. People will pay anything to see sports they can’t get tickets for. But if it’s easy to get the tickets, they won’t go if you pay them.
That’s Coe’s real concern. He may or may not care if the 80,000 seats in the Stade de France are filled with middle-distance-running zealots. But he certainly cares that they are filled. The bit on the end about lovers of sport is red meat for the columnists.
The Olympics matters because people think it does. Should it ever come to pass that the sports-agnostic, top-10-per-centers who pay shocking prices in order to say, ‘How was Paris? The Georges V – amazing – and we were blown away by the 100-metre final’ are no longer showing up, it will not matter any more.