Ben O’Shea: Poetry in Paris poo protest

Parisians are apparently feeling shitty (quite literally, as you’ll soon learn) about the Olympics, which are due to kick off in the City of Light at the end of next month.

You’d think they’d be optimistic, after research by data company Nielsen Gracenote in April revealed the host nation was on track to nearly triple the haul of 10 gold medals France won at the Tokyo Games.

Sure, there’s a chance the city will be roasted alive by our increasingly warming planet, with some predicting the 2024 Games will be the hottest on record.

Tokyo was hot and humid, and a nightmare for competitors in many sports, but Paris has the potential to be even worse.

Perhaps you’ve heard of heat domes, which seem to have supplanted rain bombs as the meteorological term de jour in America.

A heat dome is a weather phenomenon where a high-pressure area is formed in the atmosphere, trapping hot air underneath and preventing cooler air from coming in.

It can create a multi-day heatwave, generating extreme temperatures.

When climate experts talk about Paris, it’s less about a dome as it is an island — the urban heat island effect, to be exact.

Long story short, big cities with limited green spaces, and a proliferation of buildings and materials that absorb and retain heat (see: Paris’s trademark grey rooftops, made of heat-absorbing zinc), plus pollution, equals a recipe for compounding environmental factors.

Last summer was the fourth hottest on record in France, and authorities estimate 5,167 deaths in the country were attributable to heat.

The majority of these deaths were people over 75, a cohort not typically represented in Olympic selection, but even extremely fit athletes can be at risk when the mercury creeps above 40 degrees.

But no athlete at the Games will be more at risk than those expected to compete in open-water swimming events scheduled to take place in Paris’ famous Seine river.

Swimming has been banned in the Seine for a century, because the water is so polluted, but French President Emmanuel Macron pledged to clean it up for the Games.

That all sounds great, but locals are not so thrilled their government has dropped a lazy $2.26 billion on the task, when other parts of the city and country desperately need attention.

To be fair, this is a common refrain that follows the Olympics wherever it goes, and has seen a number of countries reluctant to take on hosting duties.

The difference here is the French are so good at protesting that, if it were an Olympic sport, the nation would dominate the podium.

Case in point: since May, French social media has seen an uptick in the hashtag #JeChieDansLaSeine, which translates rather colourfully to “I shit in the Seine”.

Only the French would protest the cost of a river clean-up by shitting in said river, but you have to admire the poetry of it all, especially if you imagine Parisians saying, “hon hon hon” while they did it.

The Olympics are always fascinating, and often for reasons that transcend sport, and Paris is shaping up to be just that.