From a Francophone Perspective: Gender and Race in the 2024 Paris Olympic Games

Article written by AUP Assistant Professor Caroline Laurent, French Studies and Modern Languages Department

Since 2016, through its Olympics Art Visions programme, the Olympic Foundation for Culture and Heritage has commissioned a sculpture to represent the Olympic Games. The 2024 Olympic Legacy sculpture, “Salon,” by American artist Alison Saar, shows a Black woman sitting while holding an olive branch and a gold flame. “Salon,” located in the Charles Aznavour garden near the Champs-Elysées, evokes two important issues of this year’s Olympic Games in France: gender and race.

Gender Trouble: The Struggles of Women Athletes

Women’s sports and women athletes have continuously been undervalued. Women’s sports are less talked about in the media, and their games are less frequently shown on national television. In France, women’s soccer games are usually shown on cable television and the French private payable channel Canal+, while their male counterparts’ games are shown on national television. Media exposure, including a wider range of TV broadcasting and streaming options, denotes the value attached to sports. The Olympic Games will allow women’s sports to receive (almost) equal treatment: for instance, the women’s soccer games will be shown on the channels of France Télévisions, just like the men’s soccer games.

This is not insignificant: it represents how the Paris Olympic Games have managed to achieve complete gender parity, a first in Olympic history. Half of the athletes present in France and its overseas territories for the Games are women. Compared to the 1900 Olympics that also took place in Paris, where women were first allowed to compete (in only five sports), it represents a significant increase from 2.2% in 1900 to 50% in 2024. This is not only thanks to initiatives led by the International Olympic Committee but also because of women athletes who have spoken up about sexism in sports. In the early 1920s, Alice Milliat founded the Fédération sportive féminine internationale (International Women’s Sports Federation) to fight for the inclusion of women in the Olympics. Often disregarded in the history of the Olympics, it was thus meaningful to see her golden statue rise on the Seine during the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Games, among nine other women who influenced French history. A foundation to promote women’s sports bears her name today. One hundred years after Milliat, in 2020, French fencer Ysaora Thibus launched EssentiElle Stories, a social media platform where the athlete gives “a voice to the world’s most inspiring women athletes.” Thibus’s endeavor to concentrate on women athletes is to counter the recurrent and still dominant focus on physical appearance (see, for instance, French judoka Romane Dicko’s answer to comments on her body) and on the athlete’s family/personal life—rather than on sports and actual results.

The control of women’s bodies is a recurring issue and is still relevant in these gender-equal Games. Indeed, a few days before the opening ceremony, French relay runner Sounkamba Sylla was told that she would not be able to attend the opening ceremony wearing a hijab. In sticking by the ban, citing the country’s laïcité laws despite the International Olympic Committee’s 2023 statement that there would be no restrictions on wearing the hijab, the French Olympic Committee openly attempted to control the bodies of its women athletes, especially Muslim women. Amnesty International has denounced the ban as a “discriminatory double standard” tarnishing these first Games with gender parity.

Woman, Native, Other: The Struggles of France’s Women Athletes of Color

The controversy highlights the tension in France regarding Republican universalism and multiculturalism. When Alison Saar said that, through her sculpture “Salon,” she “wanted to represent the multicultural nature of France and Paris,” she embraced and highlighted the country’s diversity. In “Diversity and Difference in postcolonial France,” historian Tyler Stovall pointed out that the universalist vision France has proudly advocated disregards the multiculturalism (notably as a direct result of colonization) of France’s population. Universalism remains too theoretical and idealistic; it fails to provide solutions for gender, racial, and religious discrimination in French society. It also further excludes differences from French national identity.

France’s diversity through its minorities was visible during the opening ceremony. Thomas Jolly, the ceremony’s artistic director, depicted a vibrant and diverse France, including its minorities in numerous scenes. Paulette Nardal, a writer from Martinique, was one of the ten golden statues of influential women. She participated in the creation of a literary movement that advocated for the rights of Black people worldwide. Aya Nakamura, a French-Malian singer, performed with France’s Republican Guard. After months of controversy over her heavy use of slang and foreign words in her songs, it was striking to see her emerge from the Institut de France, where the conservative Académie française meets to discuss matters related to the French language. The inclusion of France’s minorities in Jolly’s various scenes was so prominent that the far-right, which had won more seats than ever in the National Assembly a couple of weeks prior, was outraged by Jolly’s ‘woke’ representations.

But a certain malaise prevailed for some. On X (formerly Twitter), many commented that the France depicted by Jolly felt bittersweet: it is the France they all desire, but it is not the France they know or experience daily. There exists a discrepancy, and consequently, many felt that minorities were used as tokens in this ceremony. While Axelle Saint-Cirel, who sang the French national anthem La Marseillaise from the top of the Grand Palais, had an Afro, numerous posters pointed out the discrimination Black women encounter, particularly at work, if they keep their hair natural. This not only highlights the control that female bodies suffer but also the acute scrutiny of  women of color. Knowing they are going to be looked at, women of color internalize the expectations associated with their skin color. Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist from Martinique and a prominent figure in postcolonial studies, refers to the “epidermal racial schema” in “The Lived Experience of the Black” (“L'expérience vécue du Noir”) in Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs). Black men and women are aware of their bodies through the gaze of the other: they internalize the ways they are looked at and try to respond to this oppressive gaze. In this sense, they seek to counter this gaze, notably by proving their worth.

While Fanon applies this schema to colonial times, it remains relevant today, including through the concept of minorities’ exceptionalism. Referring to the need for Black people to reach excellence, exceptionalism is a double-edged sword: it does celebrate the achievements of Black people despite inequity, but it also stems from racist systems, as Black people need to prove themselves to show they are ‘good enough.’ Perhaps the best example of this is the French track and field sprinter Marie-José Pérec. A victim of racism and harsh scrutiny during her career, she pushed herself to win. In a recent interview, she stated that whatever she could not voice at the time, she expressed through her medals: by winning, she “lost her color” (“je perds ma couleur”). In order to prove racist people wrong, she had to be the best. Marie-José Pérec truly embodies the ambivalent space in which the best Black women athletes are confined. During the opening ceremony, she received an indirect form of apology and recognition by being an Olympic flame torchbearer and co-lighter of the cauldron. In this sense, let’s hope that the 2024 Paris opening ceremony does not remain an exceptional depiction of France but actually becomes a template for what the country should strive to truly become.