September 19, 2017

Here’s the Real Inside Story of How Paris Won the 2024 Olympics

Julien Mattia/NurPhoto via ZUMA

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Ladies and gentlemen, I present possibly the most ridiculous story ever written. This weekend the New York Times explained how Paris won the 2024 Olympics after repeated failures in recent years:

Paris Won the 2024 Olympics by Learning From Its Mistakes

Although the Olympic bidding process is notoriously opaque, Paris’s successful bid for the 2024 Olympics seems to have benefited from the hard-learned lessons of its past failures. Here are some of the things it did differently this time.

….“The main conclusion was that you had to put sports much more at the center of the bid”…. Emmanuel Macron, used his image as a young, new and popular president to push the bid into the homestretch…. “It’s important to show some unity to the I.O.C. members,” said Thierry Rey…. Bid leaders argued that their Games would be ecologically responsible, and that 95 percent of the sports venues were either already built or would be temporary…. And there was one more lesson learned by the French, according to Mr. Lee of Vero, and this one was perhaps the hardest. You must lobby, which he described as “the L word in France.”

Oh please. Hamburg, Budapest, and Rome withdrew after realizing that bidding for the Olympics was stupid and immensely costly. Los Angeles voluntarily agreed to host the 2028 games. Paris was the only city left bidding for the 2024 games. That’s why they won.

How is it possible to write more than a thousand words on this subject without mentioning that tiny little fact?

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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