Paris 2024 Faces Doubts in Early Days

(ATR) One month since Paris was awarded the 2024 Summer Olympics, controversy over salaries for executives of the organizing committee indicates intensive public scrutiny will accompany Paris 2024 for the next seven years.

Organizers are trying to downplay as premature reports that Tony Estanguet will receive an annual salary of more than €450,000 as the chief of the organizing committee. Etienne Thobois is said to be in line for a €383,000 annual pay package to serve as director general.

Both were key leaders of the Paris bid, representative of a younger generation taking command in world sport. Estanguet, 39, is a three-time Olympic champion in slalom canoe. Thobois, 50, competed in badminton for France at the 1996 Olympics followed by a career as a sports consultant.

In an interview with Paris newspaper Le Monde, sports minister Laura Flessel is defending the leadership being proposed for the organizing committee.

"Today, our duty is to continue working together. Etienne Thobois fully worked for France to win the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2024. When I was appointed Minister of Sports, I was able to work with the bid committee on a team that worked collectively.

"My role is to ensure that the mechanism does not stop. We have achieved a first step, we are expected in 2024. We must build a team that works in the interest of the country because there are major economic and societal challenges for France," she says in a translation of her remarks in the newspaper.

While Flessel supports Thobois, Mayor Anne Hidalgo is said to have doubts about whether he should continue.

French government budget director Amélie Verdier sent a memo soon after the Paris victory last month questioning the pay that would be offered for the staff of the new organizing committee.

"The wages envisaged for the staff of the OCOG are already a problem," said Verdier at the time. She also expressed concern about bonuses between €4500 and €34,500 paid to about 60 members of the Paris bid team.

The Paris organizing committee issued a statement this week noting that a compensation committee would be formed to set the salaries of staff for the new organization. During the bid, Estanguet and other bid leaders insisted that the bid team would continue to run the organizing committee.

Noted in the statement was that Sebastian Coe, head of the London 2012 Olympics, received €450,000 in annual compensation.

In her interview with Le Monde, Flessel stressed the attention that ethics would receive as part of the work of the 2024 organizing committee.

"Organizing the Olympics in 2024 is a great opportunity, and these Games must be the icing on the cake for seven years of transformation. The question of the ethics and integrity of sport at national level, but also European and international, I wanted to address it as soon as I arrived at the ministry, five months ago.

"Transparency is not an option. It's a duty. And the organization of the Games must be irreproachable. All the leaders, including Tony Estanguet, are on the same wavelength on this subject," says the sports minister.

She says a high level committee has been formed to make recommendations on the steps to be taken to ensure the Olympic organizing committee is operated without compromising ethics.

"Everything must be on the table. One can imagine the creation of a public observatory of the markets of the Games, a traceability of recruitments ... I will study all the proposals that this group of experts will formulate to guarantee ultimately the most perfect integrity.

"This reflection will enrich the Olympic and Paralympic law that I will present in November in the Council of Ministers. One of the four components of this law will be fully dedicated to ethics," says Flessel.

Reported by Ed Hula.