THE PARIS
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If you have never been aboard a high-speed train, and you happen to be in France, or other parts of Europe served by Eurostar, then it is really your chance to experience a ride unlike any other. I took my first train ride aboard the TGV in the latter part of the 1990s, as part of a group of grad students looking to escape momentarily from the pressures of Paris and the university campus.
In the South of France, several French students had leased three sail boats that we were to board and sail to a nearby island, tour a castle in ruins on the island and get back in time to resume our studies and career make or break exams.
The first thing I noticed is how sleek and clean the train cabin was, very modern and austere but far better lit and alive than a commercial airline cabin.
Everything in it looks like a jet plane and yet the big wide windows ushering in daylight and the vista of train station passengers hurrying by in finding their line, and workers tending to customers were in sharp contrast to the tiny round windows that you would be treated to onboard a plane. And there was no center isle, only big reclining seats to the left and right of the main walkway, folding trays, computer power docking plugs, and the large swooping windows were the main attraction.
When everyone settled in and strapped their seat belts, when the train started moving, it was at first imperceptible, you could hardly feel the motion, it was more of you noticing the scenery outside was beginning to slide past you.
As the thing picked up speed, you could feel it in the back of your seat but we were still going at a good pace and it was really enjoyable taking in the view as we left Paris and started traveling in gradually less urban settings.
The amazing thing about the TGV is the soft and comfortable ride while you rocketed on the ground moving at speeds that are the closest you will get to a jet plane flying a few feet above the ground.
*Something worth mentioning is that it is completely possible that the TGV today runs at a much slower speed, than the ride I was on in the 1990s. The TGV was at one point in 2007 tested for a max speed of 357 mph but interestingly enough all TGVs today run at a top of 160 to 200 mph, far below the top speed recorded in 2007. Why so much slower? Perhaps for longevity, stability on the track and long distance enjoyment as the rails lines have become inter-connnected and travel via TGV is now possible to Belgium, England, Germany, Luxembourg, Italy and Spain.
It was such a huge disparity from the old trains that still run around Paris and the periphery, the old trains were very modern, but once onboard the TGV those modern trains felt like outdated relics from the past, crammed, noisy, bumpy and rickety crickety, all working wonderfully on time, operated by the SNCF (Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français) which is loosely the National Administration of French Railroads, a government agency that went into operation in the late 1930s, fourteen years after the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris.
Our friends were busy chatting with each other and trading quips, having settled in their seats, but all eyes were on the overhead display in the forward section of the cabin displaying a live graphic and map and our trajectory with the point of departure and destination and with ETA constantly adjusting like a chronometer.
When the train quickly ascended to cruising speed, it became really difficult to look outside at the pastoral scenery, everything was such a blur, your eyes would start tearing as you attempt to look outside. The TGV was now going so fast it was almost impossible to enjoy the landscape scenery, but if you looked at the center of glass window and at the distance on the horizon, it was reasonably steady, everything surrounding that “sweet spot” was too blurry. It is possible the TGV then may have running faster than it does today*.
CLEANING UP IS HARD TO DO
Those of you catching headlines every now and then of the efforts underway by the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, and the President of France would have noticed the City of Lights has recently been the focus of particularly nasty gossip about cleaning up the Seine River around the City of Lights as to make it possible for Olympics swimmers to compete just as they did in 1922.
Headlines in December 2023 were making hey of the issue of cleaning up the river from over swelling of the storm drainage and control system that links up at
Water charity warns Paris Olympic swimmers face “alarming levels” of dangerous bacteria in Seine River – CBS News April 12, 2024
Tokyo 2020’s worrying water quality a concerning issue that threatens to rain over [Japan’s] Olympic parade – The Independent October 22, 2018
multiple sections into the sewage drainage network of the city and has often in the past resulted in leakage of waste when über heavy storms’ rainwater floods their system.
All those reports, mostly caught via American publishing outlets, somehow failed to mention that nearly all waste effluents discharged by Parisians are pumped separately into the Archères waste treatment facility. Built around World War I and modernized repeatedly over the decades Archères became one of the biggest waste treatment facilities in Europe by the end of 1970.
CALIFORNIA’S AMAZING
FIVE STAR STENCH
I would be remiss if I did not mention that right here in fabled Southern California, the land of perpetual golden sands, bikinis and hot bods, our own Hyperion sewage treatment plant has for the most recent decade, on practially an annual ritualistic basis, flooded and discharged hundreds of thousands of gallons of huntreated human waste into Long Beach and vicinity, forcing authorities to shut down access to the beaches and piers as far away as Huntington Beach – until the mishap is diluted into the Pacific.
It would not be worth mentioning had it not been for the tourist attraction these spots represent for the local economy and being nostalgia must-see for lovers of the Beach Boys era and culture. Plus Huntington Beach is now legendary for annual international surfing competitions.
But the history of the sewage network in Paris dates back to 1370 and had become a city underneath a city. In the 1800s tourists were treated to tours of the underground city which also received mention in Victor Hugo’s 1862 Les Misérables novel “…Paris has another Paris under herself; a Paris of sewers; which has its streets, its crossings, its squares, its blind alleys, its arteries, and its circulation, which is slime, minus the human form” and in H. L. Humes 1958 novel The Underground City.
The Seine has been off limits to swimmers and officially illegal for swimming for the past 100 years. Trash, bottles, tires and even bicycles have been removed from its bottom as residents and visitors alike abuse the quais they enjoy. While it is exceedingly admirable that France wishes to roll back the clock on 100 years of industrial development and pollution and make the spot accessible to bathers and formal international swimming competitions as was the case for the 1900 Paris Olympics, it is somewhat arrogant to expect significant environmental improvements to take place in the space of three years (announced in 2021 for 2024), despite a highly touted €1.4 Billion remedial efforts that belatedly kicked into gear only a year and a half ago.
In 2022 alone, the accidental overflow and discharge of sewage in Los Angeles County peeked at a record breaking combined 26 million gallons (two separate incidents) that closed beaches as far away as Malibu, Santa Monica, Redondo Beach, Long Beach all the way to Huntington Beach and southward.
The idea of cleaning up one of the world’s most famous tributaries originally started in 1990 with then Mayor (and later President of the Republic) Jacques Chirac who declared he wishes to have it cleaned up and swim in it by 1993. President Chirac passed away in 2019 without seeing his promise rewarded.
And here we are just one year before the Olympics ceremonies with plans to orchestrate a triathlon and a mixed relay event both involving athletes swimming competitively in the thus far murky unsanitary water, and let’s not forget that France’s desire to host the most flamboyant of Games in memory revolves around the first time ever opening ceremonies to be held with barges and boat parades circling l’Ile de France. Will they succeed when they failed in 1993? To read the 2023 headlines of ongoing tests of bacteria levels in the Seine is to believe that the city of Paris dumps its human waste into the river, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Retooling
THE
FASHION
CORNER
The Seine around Paris in the past decade had become such a huge tourist attraction due in part to annual summer heat that practically caused the deaths of many elderly.
As a treat, the City Mayor and advisors have recently been having white beach sand trucked in each summer creating artificial beaches along the Seine that can be enjoyed by residents and visitors alike. Dubbed Les Berges, the Promenades des Berges was created in 2013 when then Mayor Bertrand Delanoë converted the left bank expressway into a 1.6 miles (11 acres) park and recreational patches. Just like the Santa Monica Promenade on the Pacific shoreline of Los Angeles (re-launched in 1989), Paris shuttered the historical expressway in favor of pedestrian traffic and extended the park with floating platforms over the water, firmly anchored and providing extra leisure and recreational space, from hammocks and kids’ playgrounds to gardens and horticultural spaces.
It is interesting to note even though it is summer and heavy heat in Paris, not one woman in the Les Berges photo is sporting a bikini, from the country that created for the world the bikini in the 1960s, giving rise its derivative, the thong.
Yet incongruently, not one Parisian woman on the sands of Les Berges, a mini beachhead at the Seine, is seen sporting a bikini for relaxation and leisure.
Given that nude beaches crowd the Riviera sands from St. Tropez to Monaco, are these Victorian England ethos or just plain prudes at work here? Sapristi!!!!
Retooling The Fashion Corner
THE GAMES OF 2024
Just so that you don’t think this revue is solely about Paris 1924, we are going to jump ahead into the Olympics of 2024 and intermittently feature flashbacks from 1924 and more recent Games.
For this year, we have close to 10,500 Olympic athletes from 206 National Olympic Committees (basically 206 “countries”). However, in terms of geopolitical countries with borders and their own identity, there are only 195 countries in the world today including the Vatican and Palestine.
How is there this discrepancy? Because British and other overseas territories (American) and similar entities have their own National Olympic Committees like Bermuda, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hong Kong, Taiwan and so forth.
The 2024 Games will be held in France, primarily Paris, with 329 competitions in 39 sports scheduled from July 26 to August 11.
Some of the events this summer will be featured in 16 other cities across the country and in overseas territories such as the Olympic Surfing competition in Tahiti.
Three sports that debuted at the Tokyo 2020 Games, boulder/wall climbing, surfing and skateboarding will be part of the events this year. The Paris Games will also debut a new sport titled “Breaking” which is basically the street style “breakdancing” that originated in New York in the 1970s.
The 2024 games will, for the first time in Olympic history, feature an equal number of medal events for men and women. Source – International Olympic Committee
Of course, being summer sports, the most traditional and most watched events will be Track and Field, Marathon Running, and Racewalking. Now referred to as Athletics, this event involves competitive running, jumping, throwing, and walking.
The most common types of athletics competitions are track and field, road running, cross-country running, and racewalking.
The 2024 games will, for the first time in Olympic history, feature an equal number of medal events for men and women.
Four venues in Paris will include the Pont d’Iéna for race walking, Hôtel de Ville and Les Invalides for the start and end points of the marathon races.
The Stade de France will be used for the track and field events. Athletics will comprise 48 medal events (48x3x2 for a total of 288 medals).
The Marathon Race Walking Mixed Relay will for the first time replace the Men’s 50 km race walk.
The new race introduced in April 2023 will feature a controversial format, the relay involves two athletes, one man and one woman from each national team, the distance of the marathon is a total of 42.2 km and each athlete has to perform two legs each, alternating in this order: male 11.45 km, female 10 km, male 10 km, female 10.75 km. The minimum qualifying time is set at 1:20:10 for the men and for the women at 1:29:20.
The individual 20 km marathon race remains on the program.
A New Era in Olympic Sports
Other extremely popular Olympic summer events this year will be gymnastics, football, swimming, tennis and cycling. Tennis has had a checkered history in the Olympics, starting off in the very first of the Modern Era in 1896 in Greece. But Tennis was dropped after the 1924 Games in Paris over disagreements with the International Lawn Tennis Federation on how to define amateur qualifications for players.
Olympics Tennis returned in full force after the 1988 Games in Seoul but with one distinct difference, the tennis athletes were professional players on the Grand Slam circuits, from Wimbledon and Roland Garros to the US Open and Australian Open.
The IOC relaxed their rules to allow professional athletes to compete in the 1988 Games and by 1992, any professional athlete in any sport or event organized by the IOC could compete alongside amateur athletes in the Games. Basketball NBA greats like Larry Bird could qualify for the national US Olympic team and participate, as he did in 1992 Barcelona Olympics.
The pro/amateur dividing wall was gone.
This year the 2024 USOC national team will include NBA players like LeBron James (Los Angeles Lakers), Stephen Curry (Golden State Warriors), and Kevin Durant (Phoenix Suns), pro golfing champion Collin Morikawa (U.S. Open & PGA tournaments).
The IOC and many industry observers rationalized this new approach based on the multitude of factors converging on the world of sports. From sponsors who were so heavily investing in their chosen “amateur” players they were trained and funded almost at pro levels, to athlete doping in Russian and Chinese team members, and the occasional scandals in non-Olympic events such as American athletes’ world leading cyclist Lance Armstrong.
Tokyo 2020 Games Multi Medalists
Doping scandals in sports were so persistent at one time that the IOC adopted rigorous testing regimes and striped any athletes of medals and honors if found, before or after the game, to have been involved with performance enhancement drugs. In total, thus far, since the 1980 Games, there has 147 medals striped from their champions.
Outside of the Olympics, in the USA, Lance Armstrong made the biggest splash in terms of losing all seven of his Tour de France racing titles. Once considered a legend in cycling, Armstrong eventually confessed to a massive doping scheme and was at one point accused by the US Anti-Doping Agency of being the head of a massive doping ring, accusations he refused to contest which resulted in a ban for life from any athletic competitions, effectively ending his career.
The US Anti-Doping Agency is a unit of the World Anti-Doping Agency which was created by the International Olympic Committee. But Armstrong is not alone in his predicament, other big doping scandals involved Baseball legend Barry Bonds who was thrown out of the Hall of Fame, and Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson struck from the Olympic record books.
There was also the accusation that the wealthiest of nations consistently fielded the best athletes at the Olympics and went home with the most medals, a difficult to hide outcome that each top-listed country would play to big fanfare, with endless parades and daytime TV interviews and magazine covers leading to bigger sponsors in a self-feeding loop, all leading to the crushing disappointment of smaller and poorer nations who could barely afford tosend in their amateur-qualified national teams and always went home nearly empty handed.
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The Paris Olympics 2024 | West Coast Midnight Run™
A Fun, spirited look at the highlights of the Paris Olympics Summer Games of 2024 from West Coast Midnight Run™ publication.
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