IIt must be a pretty strange feeling. You’re in charge of the biggest event your country has ever hosted. You’ve been working on this event for almost 10 years, basically sacrificing everything else in your life, and now it’s just one week away.
“It’s a very strange feeling,” said Tony Estanguet, president of the 2024 Olympic Games organizing committee. “I come from a small town in the southwest of France. My sport is very minor. It’s been a tough journey. But I’m here, and now we’re all here.”
Paris 2024, with 10,500 participants, 329 sports, 4,500 staff, 40,000 volunteers, 10 million spectators and four billion television viewers, will open this Friday with a “unique” parade of 160 boats along the Seine – the first Olympic opening ceremony to take place outside a stadium.
Under the watchful eye of more than 45,000 police and security personnel, the national teams will sail past Notre Dame Cathedral, under the Pont des Arts and Pont Neuf bridges, and all the way to the Eiffel Tower. Watched by 300,000 spectators along the Seine, Son et Lumiere A spectacle of light and music.
Estanguett, a quiet, unassuming three-time Olympic champion who won individual canoe slalom gold medals at the Sydney, Athens and London Olympics, bears a striking resemblance to former England football manager Gareth Southgate. For him, Friday is fast approaching. “This is the first big moment, the moment to show the world that these Olympics are really going to be different,” he says, sipping a soft drink in a deserted bar on the square opposite the organizing committee headquarters in Saint-Denis, a northern Paris suburb. “We had to work really, really hard for that.”
The Olympics are “a once-in-a-century event for the host country,” said Estanguet, 46. “It’s a once-in-a-century opportunity for the country to showcase the best of what it has to offer and to put on a really great, most spectacular sporting spectacle.”
“Boldness and ambition” has been the organizing committee’s slogan since the start of their bid in 2015, he says. “Paris is a special city and we wanted to do something special, something really different: we wanted to make the city the venue. We wanted to take sport outside the stadiums as much as possible.”
Fifteen of the city’s most famous landmarks will be hosting events: fencing at the Grand Palais, archery at Les Invalides, beach volleyball at the Champ de Mars near the Eiffel Tower, road cycling and marathon swimming on Pont Alexandre III, BMX, basketball, breakdancing and skateboarding at Place de la Concorde, and equestrian events at the Palace of Versailles.
As well as providing great television, this is part of an attempt to make the Paris Games more sustainable than ever before through temporary venues, environmental action, new sports targeted at a younger, more urban audience and greater public involvement, including a “marathon for everyone” on the same course as the Olympic events.
Although Estanguet may appear timid at first glance, ambition and boldness are not qualities he lacks. Born in the Pyrenees town of Pau to parents who were sports teachers, he grew up as a top athlete, competing against his idolized older brother for France’s only canoe slalom spot at the Sydney Olympics.
“I always looked up to my father. He was a role model for me,” he said. “When I was little, I used to watch him from the riverbank. Then he taught me a lot. He took me to the top.” The brothers competed together for many years as members of France’s European and World Championship canoe slalom teams.
At the 1996 Atlanta Games, Estanguet’s brother Patrice, five years his senior, won a bronze medal. But when the qualifying rounds for the next Games began, the brothers found themselves competing against each other for France’s spots. “It was tough,” he says. “I’ve always looked up to him and respected him, but he handled it brilliantly. He sat me down about a year before and said, ‘Look, the only way we’re going to get through this is by going our separate ways for a while. We have to keep our relationship.'”
Toni won the gold medal in Sydney (just barely) after surviving the French qualifying rounds (“for Patrice, because he could have won it just as much as I did”), and four years later in Athens he won gold again, beating the man who would become his greatest rival for two decades by just 12/100ths of a second.
Slovakian slalom canoeist Michal Martikán was Estenguett’s toughest and most consistent rival, winning two Olympic gold medals to the Frenchman’s three. As much as his relationship with Patrice, Estenguett’s rivalry with Martikán “is a big part of my story,” Estenguett says. “He was a genius. We were so different. He was smaller than me, really strong, very technical, very close. My style was more fluid, more supple, smoother. A rivalry like that teaches you determination. And perseverance.”
With the French team’s 2008 triumph on his shoulders, he needed both. Tricolor At the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, Estanguett missed out on a place in the final, losing unsurprisingly to Martikán. “It was the first time I’d suffered such a bad defeat at that level,” he says.
“When you lose badly at the Olympics, it’s hard to accept, especially when you’re the defending champion and the favorite to win. I was 30 years old and competing in my third Olympics. I struggled a lot with the idea of giving up.” Instead, he turned to his brother.
“I just said to him, ‘Come on, train me and get me fired up again,'” he says, “and he said yes, so we had one last great adventure together.”
With Patrice’s help, Estenguett became world champion in 2009 and 2010, European champion in 2011 and Olympic gold medallist in 2012. “I’m sitting here today because I may have failed in Beijing but I didn’t collapse. I kept my cool, I bounced back and regained my confidence,” he says.
Having studied sports management for two years, Estinguett knew that this was the path he wanted to take when he gave up top-level competition after the London Games. He was the first French athlete to be elected to the International Olympic Committee’s Athletes’ Commission.
Already working for the International Canoeing Federation and the World Anti-Doping Agency, he was invited by the French Olympic Committee to “learn everything about the politics, economics, diplomacy surrounding sport. It was a steep learning curve.”
In 2016, he was named co-chair of France’s bid to host the 2024 Olympics, and by 2017, when Paris officially won the rights to host the games after Los Angeles agreed to a postponement, “I had moved completely into a different world.”
“The Paris team was 50 people then. Now it’s 4,000. It’s just… huge.”
So does a glittering athletic career provide good preparation for an organizational challenge on the scale of the Olympics? Estanguett is clear about what an elite athlete can and cannot contribute. “There’s this thing of acknowledging your ambition,” he says. “As an athlete, if your goal is to be in the top 10, you’re not going to win very often. And it doesn’t always work out that way. But it’s important. If I was going to do this job, this Olympics had to be extraordinary.”
Rigor, discipline and responsibility are key: “Understand that you have to train every day and work hard at things you don’t know how to do, and that you can’t afford to get angry when things don’t go your way. Take responsibility and be confident that your decisions are right because you’ve put in the effort.”
“In sports, nothing happens as you predict it. There are always competitors who don’t know what to do, and the weather comes into play. You deal with it. You say: ‘It’s not going to go as planned, but there is a solution, and it can usually be solved in an instant.'”
The Paris 2024 Games have been riddled with unexpected challenges, with the coronavirus pandemic causing years of uncertainty and then Russia’s invasion of Ukraine causing inflation that took a tough toll.
“With a budget of 4 billion euros, 15 percent inflation is a huge problem,” Estanguett said. “We had to reduce the number of sites.”
Gymnastics and basketball, which were scheduled to be held at separate venues, were combined, and shooting, originally held at a temporary venue in the city, will now be held at the National Shooting Center two hours away.
And teamwork: “Even in individual sports, you need a good team,” says Estanguet. “Organizing the Olympic Games is the biggest collaboration ever. Athletes, security, traffic people, politicians, unions, sponsors, police, local authorities… everyone has to be moving more or less at the same speed and in the same direction. That’s the job.”
Estanguett recognized there was a skill he didn’t have and needed: “Public speaking,” he says. “When you have to address heads of state, rich people, great athletes who are idols in the sports world… I was never good at it. I took a lot of lessons. Now I’m OK.”
And now, with just a week to go until the Opening Ceremony, are you worried about anything? The French in general, and Parisians in particular, are notoriously difficult to please, but Estenguett says he has taken heart from many conversations with Seb Coe, the great middle-distance champion who was his opponent in London.
“So far, everything has been as he said it would be,” he says. “There were a few years when no one was interested at all, then a few years when too many people were interested and tried to intervene, then a lot of silly arguments, and then the last year was just very, very hard work.”
“The relief will come when your country wins its first medal, so I’ll be happy to oblige,” Coe told Estanguett. Meanwhile, on the morning of our interview, he was delighted to swim in the Seine with Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris. After a costly clean-up program and months of doubt, the river is finally deemed clean.
“It was an iconic moment,” he said, “and it encapsulates what we want these games to be: a spectacular spectacle of athletes swimming through one of the most beautiful cities in the world. That’s magic. And it’s an investment. We’re leaving a river where people can swim. That’s also magic.”
