The Olympics can’t mask Macron’s troubles

Politics and sport have always been cynical and self-interested bedfellows. Rulers since the Caesars have been eager to spend vast sums of taxpayers’ money on circuses to distract the plebs. In more recent times, Louis XIV (a ghostly presence in Friday’s Paris Olympics ceremony) made self-glorification through spectacle a pillar of his reign. Emmanuel Macron made no secret of his desire to follow in the Sun King’s footsteps. Friday night was to be his apotheosis. It would have been absurdly optimistic to think this could rebuild his popularity at home, but he must have relished cutting a great global figure. 

Even the patron saint of the modern Olympics, Philippe de Coubertin, had political ambitions. French schoolboys were notoriously unathletic, and for men such as Coubertin this was the road to national decadence. His remedy was to ‘put colour into the cheeks of solitary and confined youth’ and thus ‘exalt the Fatherland, the race, the flag’.