There's an old saying that “both fish and diners stink after three days,” but that won't be the case if determined French Olympic organizers, who are determined to brave the summer heat, have their way.
This means that if air conditioning is not provided to the host city's athletes in the interest of environmental protection, they may end up sleeping rough all night and stinking.
Two years ago, athletes at the Beijing Winter Olympics complained about no internet, dirty rooms and poor quality food, but the Paris Olympics, which already shocked the world with an anti-Christian opening ceremony that featured a nasty parody of “The Last Supper,” appear to want to keep those standards as they are.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
To keep thousands of athletes safe and comfortable in the Olympic Village, organizers planned to rely on a geothermal system that pumps chilled water under the floor rather than installing air conditioning. But assurances that the system would keep indoor temperatures about 11 degrees cooler than outdoors didn't seem to have much credibility in what is shaping up to be the hottest year on record.
The plan has raised concerns from the United States and many other countries that runners, gymnasts, swimmers and other athletes competing in the biggest games of their lives will not get the rest and recovery they need to perform at their best in temperatures reaching 80 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit. As Matt Carroll of the Australian Olympic Committee said last year, “We're not going to be a picnic.”
Do I really need AC?
Some observers (such as commenters here) have complained about spoiled athletes who should be able to tolerate the heat. As a former professional athlete, I have no sympathy for complaints about heat during competition. Experienced athletes have to develop the conditioning (I've experienced it myself) to where high temperatures feel normal.
But all that effort is wasted if you're tossing and turning at night on flypaper-like sheets that prevent you from getting a good night's sleep. Air conditioners may not be “natural,” but neither is living in an urbanized environment surrounded by heat-generating machines and heat-retaining concrete. That, and the air conditioners that counter it, are part of what we call civilization.
How much CO2 emissions will be reduced?
But the last word is a dirty word for Greentopians. Commentator Monica Showalter wrote about the Olympic debacle:
Have you just finished running a training marathon or a 400-meter sprint as fast as humanly possible in the blistering heat of a Paris summer? Have you just finished soccer or basketball practice? Have you just finished lifting 1,076 pounds?
You don't need air conditioning, sweat it out. Sorry if you don't like it, but the Paris Commission has a planet to save.
This is no exaggeration. Consider this: “In the run up to the Olympics, French authorities had adhered to the view that air conditioning was unnecessary and unacceptable, given the impact that energy consumption has on the climate,” The Times reports. “'We have a lot of respect for the comfort of the athletes, but we are thinking more about the survival of humanity,'” Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo told a French radio station last year. Really?
France gets 68 percent of its electricity from nuclear power (the highest of any country). In other words, unless Madame Mayol has brain freeze from enjoying air conditioning whenever she wants, she should know that the Olympic policies won't reduce CO2 emissions by a millimeter. It's all pretense, symbolism over substance.
This, too, is old news now. The Times further reports that after complaints, the organizers have backed down and allowed the teams to order air conditioners at their own expense and have them delivered to the Olympic Village. But the paper also points out that this makes the competition less fair: teams from poorer countries may not be able to afford this luxury. France is now a little more free, but equality has gone out the window thanks to left-wing obsession.
And that's not all: again following a pattern from Beijing, 2024 Olympians also complain about cramped conditions, poor quality food (lacking in protein) and “recyclable cardboard beds” (seriously, we're not making this up).
It's easy to be idealistic if you don't have to live up to your ideals
That said, the aforementioned mentality is not unique; rather, it is typical left-wing outsourcing of sacrifice. Consider what a liberal New York City parent, frustrated by plans to integrate Brooklyn schools, said in 2015: “When it comes to my own kids, it's a lot more complicated.” Somehow, all of a sudden, he no longer thought the statement “our strength lies in our diversity” was a self-evident truth.
For this reason, National Review called Brooklyn the “capital of liberal hypocrisy.” But the competition is fierce. Consider the plight of “Mister D,” a multiple sclerosis patient in Gothenburg, Sweden, who was willing to pay for a more effective, more expensive drug but was turned down. “Bureaucrats said it would set a bad precedent and lead to unequal access to medicines,” columnist Walter Williams wrote in 2009.
Now, exit question: Do you believe that people at the top of the Swedish government, or other pseudo-elites connected to it, have been denied life-improving medication and essentially told to “remain crippled in the name of equality”?
Are America's pseudo-elites (e.g., Nancy Pelosi) “diversifying” their neighborhoods as they preach others should, when, as pundit Tucker Carlson puts it, the neighborhoods they live in still look like 1955?
And do you think Mayor Hidalgo and other wealthy environmentalists would deny themselves air conditioning (and the comforts of life in general) even while they're jetting around in private jets on their way to climate conferences?
The moral of the story is that if you're a pseudo-elite who's best at pretending to care, you're sure to land the gold medal when attacking the underdog.
