At 20:24pm, the Arc de Triomphe was emblazoned with the logo for the city’s 2024 Olympic bid: a swirling ribbon routine of the number 24. Or possibly a 21. Or maybe just the number 4.
By the time the 2024 Olympics roll around, it will have been a century since the last Paris Olympics, when British runners Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell took home the gold, inspiring the movie Chariots Of Fire.
The Olympic bid committee’s Twitter account has been awash with pictures of athletes holding up the logo, which could just as easily be an unfinished fraction. 2/3rds? 2/4ths?
The logo is meant to evoke the shape of the Eiffel Tower, at least if the Eiffel Tower was slowly wilting and in grave structural danger.
In this, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo demonstrates how easy it is to draw the 2024 bid’s logo. Or the 2121 bid. Or the 2424 bid, when the Eiffel Tower will probably look exactly like the illustration.
Paris lost the bid for the 2012 Olympics to London, of course, and now faces a tough battle against Los Angeles, Rome, Hamburg, Budapest, and anyone who wants to enjoy living in the city eight years from now. Parisians can take solace in the fact that they will most likely be on their nearly institutional summer vacations—like the rest of the city—in August 2024, when the summer games will likely take place. Those who manage to leave on August 1st and stay on vacation until August is almost over may never know that the 2024 Paris Olympics even happened—if they ever do.
