By Monica Showalter
What fresh hell is this from the wokester Paris Olympics?
According to the Los Angeles Times, elite athletes are being forced to go without air conditioning in the sweltering Paris summer, all to save the planet.
Instead of installing A/C to keep housing safe and comfortable for thousands of athletes staying in the Olympic village, organizers planned to rely on a geothermal system that pipes in cool water underneath the floors. But their assurances that the system was capable of keeping indoor temperatures about 11 degrees cooler than outdoors did not inspire much confidence during a year that’s on track to be the hottest on record.
The plan prompted concerns from many countries — including the United States — that runners, gymnasts, swimmers and other athletes in the biggest competition of their lives would not get the rest and recovery they need to perform their best as temperatures reach the upper 80s and 90s. As Matt Carroll with the Australian Olympic Committee put it last year, “We’re not going for a picnic.”
Just got done running a practice Marathon or a 400-meter sprint at a speed as fast as humanly possible, in the Paris summer heat wave? Just finished a practice session of soccer or basketball? Just got done lifting 1,076 pounds of weights?
No air conditioner for you, bub, sweat it out. Too bad if you don’t like it, the Paris committee has a planet to save.
Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s how bad it was:
In the lead-up to the Games, French officials were uncompromising in their view that A/C would be unnecessary and unacceptable because of the impact of energy consumption on the climate. “I have a lot of respect for the comfort of athletes, but I think a lot more about the survival of humanity,” Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo told a French radio station last year.
As Eric Hoffer once wrote in The Passionate State of Mind, published in 1955, people like these are “the enemies of mankind.”
Those who would sacrifice a generation to realize an ideal are the enemies of mankind. We acquire a sense of worth either by realizing our talents, or by keeping busy, or by identifying ourselves with something apart from us–be it a cause, a leader, a group, possessions and the like.
The athletes are in category one. Their hosts are in category two, justifying their callous indifference as wondering how dare these elite athletes expect to be cooled down to a comfortable temperature, such as their bodies require to get their necessary rest when we’ve got a planet to save?
Of course with trash like this going on, there was a participant revolt as these self-respecting athletes and their trainers stood up for themselves.
In the end, organizers’ plans to save energy by not providing A/C evaporated with a compromise that allowed teams to order thousands of A/C units and bring them into the Olympic village at their own expense.
Imported air conditioning is never as good as the piped-in real thing, so this was triage for the richer nations with bigger Olympic budgets. The poorer nations, with smaller Olympic budgets, so far as the editorial went — think of the poorer African states or the tiny Pacific island states, and many other nations with fewer athletic resources — got nothing. But oh, their godawful conditions in Paris make for a greener planet, so they must be so happy.
This is crappy hosting. And the Times notes that it’s part of a string of bad hosting decisions for elite athletes who have spent their entire lives training to the absolute human max for their events and have a right to expect just minimal comforts of civilization, such as air conditioning like normal people in Iowa get, or proper food with animal-based protein such as world-class athletes need (actually, they need extra animal-based protein given the calories they burn) for their Olympic competitions instead of greenie plant-based substitutes of these greenie committees which have been a disaster. See here, here and here. Some of the athletic teams reportedly have already packed up and gone to hotels, given the godawaful conditions in the Village.
The Times also said that uncomfortable cardboard beds to save the planet have been foisted on the athletes, and far left radical greens outside the committee have vowed to poop in the cleaned-up Seine river to force the athletes to swim in their self-designated toilet which could make them sick.
You thought the green swimming pool of Brazil was the grossest thing that ever happened at the Olympics, or the Brits dancing around a ‘death’ figure to celebrate the National Health Service was the most disgusting? No, it’s got to be these Paris Olympics, who have made each Olympic athlete in need of deluxe accommodations for the apex of their careers an ambassador for the get-rid-of-greenie-wokesterism movement.
The green movement has always been about succoring the elites, selling them carbon credits as they jet off in a plume of private-plane effluvia. But this treatment of the elites was a bad miscalculation.
If they can treat elites this way with their unearned power and lack of consent from the public, it’s a warning that they will do the same stuff to the rest of us — taking away our air conditioners, our gas stoves, our fireplaces, our plastic straws, our meat, our flush toilets and everything else. What chance does the little guy have when even the elite athletes of the Olympics who don’t just want certain basics of civilization but actually need those basics get treated like this by these green overlords?
Let’s hope this horrible experience for the athletes gets around and represents the moment the greenie overlords jumped the shark and had to be driven back to the pinched little sweat-Nazi hellhole they came from.