But comically, when the Games begin next month, the Olympic Village, designed to demonstrate sustainability, will end up wasting more energy than organisers had hoped.
That's because portable air conditioners will be ubiquitous: transported, shipped and ordered by visiting nations who want their players to sleep well and perform at the highest level, even if it means an increase in carbon emissions.
Worried about what could be the world's hottest year on record, wealthy countries have virtually ignored Paris' centerpiece sustainability measures, signaling their preference for environmental goals — but not if it means risking the comfort of their own athletes, some of whom are accustomed to cooler temperatures than they'll get in their dormitories, and have voiced their concerns to their national Olympic committees.
“This is a high-performance environment,” said Strath Gordon, director of communications at the Australian Olympic Committee, one of the countries that has adopted AC.
To understand the scale of portable air conditioner usage planned for the Olympics, The Washington Post contacted 20 major Olympic sporting nations. Of the eight that responded, all, including the United States, said they planned to install portable air conditioners in some or all of their athletes' rooms. Others with plans include Britain, Canada, Italy and Germany, which said it would install air conditioners to a limited extent but only for participants in some sports. If Japan, which did not respond to The Washington Post's inquiries, goes ahead with its own air conditioner installation plan announced at a press conference last December, all G7 countries except the host country will have air conditioners installed.
Combined, these countries, along with Greece, Denmark and Australia, which also responded to The Washington Post, had more than 3,000 athletes participate in the last Tokyo Olympics, more than a quarter of the total.
One uncertainty is China, which did not respond to questions. It has the world's largest delegation and is seeing unusually fast growth in air-conditioning use in the country.
“We're taking them and we're bringing them back to Greece,” said Alexandra Paris, president of Greece's Olympic Environmental Sustainability Committee, saying the country was honoring the athletes' wishes. “They need support because what they're doing is very difficult anyway.”
Many other countries are also due to acquire the French AC.
The move away from air conditioning is just one part of Paris' overall plan to reduce the environmental impact of mega-events, but it's highly symbolic in that it forces participating countries to consider whether they want to take part in a sustainability experiment. Traditional energy-intensive privileges are being given in the name of environmental goals. The joint decision by some of the biggest powers also raises questions about equality: portable air conditioners are an expense that poorer nations' delegations may not be able to afford, and athletes in the same Olympic Village may end up sleeping at different temperatures.
“We don't have deep pockets,” said Donald Lukare, a lawyer who chairs the Uganda Olympic Committee. He recalled how at an international sporting event in sweltering heat in Turkey a few years ago, athletes stayed in rooms without air conditioning. Some federations shipped portable units, but Uganda did not. “We didn't have the money,” he said.
Paris organizers realized a year ago that air conditioning was a sensitive issue, which is why officials included portable air conditioners in what's known as a “tariff” — a list of extras or accessories available to visiting countries. The Olympic and Paralympic Village proposed to buy the property to renovate athletes' dormitories and offices. But the proposal overlapped with a campaign to convince visitors that the cooling methods already in place, especially the geothermal system with underfloor cooling pipes, worked well enough. Officials stressed that indoor temperatures would be at least 6 °C (11 °F) lower than the outside temperature. They explained that they had carried out simulations of heat waves. The head of the Olympic and Paralympic Village stressed that the athletes would “be able to rest properly.”
Even with the large number of portable air conditioners, Georgina Glennon, Paris 2024's director of environmental excellence, said Paris's Olympic Village concept would pay dividends for decades, because after the games, the area of new buildings will be converted into apartments for about 6,000 people. In a world that needs to reduce carbon emissions, people don't need to churn their air conditioners to 65 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, Glennon said.
“When we came up with this model, we thought about the lifespan of the building,” she said.
What about deciding which countries to visit?
“It's a shame,” she said.
Why air conditioning isn't chic in Paris
The idea of spending summer without air conditioning is quintessentially Parisian.
In French families, And Paris is striving to be at the forefront of global climate change, aiming to become Europe's greenest city by 2030. That means adding bike lanes, expanding the city's green space, and, of course, finding smarter ways to beat the heat.
So the Olympic Village devised several strategies to minimize energy consumption while keeping living spaces reasonably cool. Many of these strategies were simply a matter of design: On a media tour this week, officials pointed to white sidewalks that don't trap heat, an abundance of trees and grass, and airy walkways between buildings designed to capture the Seine's cool air. river.
They then led reporters into a dorm room with beds made from cardboard, mattresses made from recycled fishing nets and no air conditioning vents in sight.
(By the way, there was a floor fan in the room.)
In these rooms, the heart of the cooling system is hidden beneath the floorboards, a maze of pipes that send chilled water through the floor. During our tour, Glennon explained that the system is reversible, meaning it can also send hot water in the winter. The water goes through a series of exchanges before returning to a source 230 feet underground.
The system is more efficient than traditional air conditioners because it takes advantage of relatively stable subsurface temperatures. The system used in the dorms is also different from traditional air conditioners because there is no guaranteed or set temperature, officials said. The athletes' rooms have thermostats, but their use is limited, according to Laurent Michaud, director of the athletes' village. The thermostats control the rate at which water circulates, making a difference of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, he said.
In Paris, about a third of the Olympic Village – the area designated for office space – is using a different system that is similar to a conventional air conditioning system but with ventilation.
But running water through the floorboards has its limitations: If the water in the floor pipes is too cold, it can condense, like a soda can running on a hot day. Solideo, the company that is building the Olympic infrastructure, said the water running through the floorboards will be 64 degrees Fahrenheit.
Paris authorities have faced repeated questions about what would happen if a heatwave hits. In Europe, the hottest 10 years on record all occurred since 2007. Five years ago, Paris recorded a record high temperature of 109 degrees on July 25. As of July 26, when the Olympics open, recent high temperatures have ranged from a comfortable 75 degrees to a brutal 102 degrees.
Officials say with good habits like keeping curtains closed during the day, temperatures inside dorms will not exceed 79 degrees Fahrenheit.
Architect Nicolas Giesel, who helped design about a fifth of the Village's buildings, said he used a similar cooling system in an apartment building in Strasbourg he completed five years ago and has never heard a complaint, but acknowledged that any predictions about indoor temperatures are “highly hypothetical” given global climate change.
“Who's to say that one day it won't reach 50%? [Celsius]”It's 122 degrees Fahrenheit. We're in a situation that's never been seen before,” asked Ziesel, co-founder of the KOZ architectural firm.
Why do competitors care about being cool?
Elite athletes have good reason to want assurances that temperatures will be tolerable: Some athletes may prefer to sleep during the day due to competition times, and some Paralympic athletes competing after the Olympics may have “difficulty regulating their body temperature,” as Japanese Olympic Committee Secretary-General Ogata Mitsugu said at a press conference.
And then there's the question of what the athletes are used to.
“Temperature control is important,” says Kat Holmes, a fencer from Washington, D.C. “I like to sleep really cold.”
To be more precise, she likes the temperature setting at 69 degrees.
Paris will be Holmes' third Olympics, at age 30. Between those and the Olympics, not to mention the World Cup, national tournaments and the Pan American Games, she's seen just about every kind of housing situation, and she says she considers herself “pretty adaptable.” She regularly competes in hot places like Cuba and cold places like winters in Europe, where the heating in her accommodations runs full blast and residents can't shut it off.
“Sometimes we would open the windows and just let the snowstorm come in,” she said.
But fencers in particular benefit from a temperature-controlled environment, she said, because equipment that needs to circulate can “get really dirty” if left in a humid place. Even a fencer's sword can rust.
Holmes said she believes Paris will be her last Olympics. She is training to be a doctor and will soon begin her residency as part of medical school. She said she would “survive” without air conditioning, but this is the culmination of a long career and she wants to excel. And she wants to sleep.
“I'm very much in favor of protecting the environment,” she said, “but the purpose of this event is to bring together the best athletes in the world and have them perform at their best.”
