PARIS — It’s been a mostly seamless Olympics for Paris 2024, but in the final days, organizers are confronting a problem that they should have seen coming from one million miles, or maybe 94 million miles, which is the distance from the sun to the earth.
Or perhaps just 26.2 miles, the hallowed marathon distance, because that’s where the problem lies.
The men’s and women’s marathons are scheduled for Saturday and Sunday mornings, which look like they will be two of the most scorching days of the Paris summer. Bright sunshine is forecast for both days. The high on Saturday is expected to be in the high 80s. The high on Sunday is supposed to climb into the low 90s.
The men might get lucky. The race, which follows a course from the center of the city out to Versailles and back, starts at 8 a.m. and should be over by 10:30, before the most scorching weather of the day arrives.
The women won’t be so lucky. The heat that is supposed to arrive through the afternoon on Saturday isn’t likely to dissipate very much overnight Saturday. It’s going to be a miserable race, with conditions that could be dangerous for participants.
World Athletics, which works with Paris 2024 to oversee the running events, referred any scheduling questions to the local organizing committee, which is in charge of the race. Paris 2024 has yet to respond to questions about any potential changes to the schedule.
Options are limited. The closing ceremony takes place Sunday night. There’s no wiggle room to postpone the races until more friendly temperatures arrive, as there was when organizers waited last week for the Seine to become safer for swimming than it was after some downpours that polluted the river and forced a delay in the men’s triathlon.
Also, there has never been a discussion about holding the race anywhere else. At the last Olympics, organizers in Tokyo moved the marathon to the mountains of Sapporo to avoid the brutal summer heat of Japan’s capital. Sapporo was plenty hot, too, but nothing like Tokyo. Sailing is taking place in Marseille. Surfing in Tahiti. Marathons in the cooler Alpine areas of France, where the altitude is higher and the temperatures are lower, might not have been a bad idea.
Paris can have its cool mornings in the summer. Organizers crossed their fingers and hoped for those. It seems after two weeks of mostly good fortune following the rain on the opening ceremony, their luck may have run out.
Time was when the men’s marathon started in the late afternoon on the final day of the Olympics. The marathons finished in the Olympic Stadium, just as spectators gathered for the closing ceremony. It made for high-profile and majestic settings for one of the signature events of any Olympics.
In 2021, the Olympic marathons were held in the cooler climate of Sapporo to avoid the searing Tokyo heat. Paris organizers opted not to make a similar shift. (Lintao Zhang / Getty Images)
A warming planet and hot summers have gotten the better of that concept. In Athens in 2004, some runners wore ice vests until the final moments before the start to keep their cores as cool as possible. It helped in the first few miles but just delayed the inevitable.
At the World Athletics Championships in 2019, which took place in October to avoid the worst heat of the year in Qatar, organizers held the marathons in the middle of the night. It worked and it didn’t. Multiple runners still left the finish line in wheelchairs.
It’s true that warmer temperatures are part of what makes the Olympic marathon different from spring and fall marathons. The heat makes it a tactical race, rather than a time trial. Runners who lack the speed of the fastest distance runners can compete, using grit and guile to keep up with their faster competitors.
But there is heat that makes a race competitive and heat that puts athlete health in jeopardy.
Paris organizers are actually holding a marathon on Saturday night for regular folks, allowing thousands of runners to participate in the “Marathon Pour Tous” (Marathon For All) and run the same course as the Olympians. It’s part of the ongoing effort to make the Paris Olympics feel like a Games that belongs to the people.
It’s a lovely idea. The nighttime start might make it slightly tolerable, or at least more tolerable than during the day.
Here’s another one: Maybe have the women run at that time as well. Sunday could be very ugly.
GO DEEPER
Sifan Hassan begins Olympic treble with bronze in 5,000m
(Top photo of marathon race walkers competing earlier this week in Paris: Image Photo Agency / Getty Images)
