“The hunt for waste”, as the Minister for Sports and the Olympics Amélie Oudéa-Castéra said at the end of August on the occasion of a visit by the IOC (International Olympic Committee) to Paris, started several years ago. month.
From its “Pulse” tower in Saint-Denis, a stone’s throw from the ring road, the services of the organizing committee (Cojo) are working on a budget revision planned for a long time but which has taken a complex turn since the war in Ukraine and a galloping inflation.
At the end of 2020, the organizing committee had made savings of 300 million, in particular by eliminating temporary sites. How much will you need to find this time? The Cojo does not want to give any figures before December 12, the date of a crucial board meeting with this revision on the menu, limiting itself to mentioning several tens of millions of euros.
Currently, the budget of the organizing committee is close to four billion euros (3.98). Its revenue is made up of tickets sold, a contribution from the IOC and revenue from partnerships.
In this regard, and despite the Cojo’s repeated assurances of its ability to complete its sponsorship program to the tune of 1.1 billion euros (80% of which this year), Amélie Oudéa-Castéra had let go at the end of August that it should “perhaps sometimes work on optimizations of less revenue”.
– “Up to the sandwiches” –
Five first-tier sponsors (Carrefour, Sanofi, BPCE, EDF and Orange) have already signed up and Bernard Arnault’s LVMH group has been expected for months as the next on the list.
While waiting for the receipts to arrive, the Cojo is negotiating with the IOC, which has just spent a fortnight within its walls, to revise the specifications downwards. And this one does it with good grace, according to several sources. “He is playing his survival in Paris”, deciphers one of them with AFP while the international committee is finding fewer and fewer candidate cities to organize this giant event with a complex environmental and budgetary equation.
“We go through everything down to the sandwiches,” assured AFP Christophe Dubi, IOC member and executive director of the Games at the end of August. It is therefore above all a question of reducing the levels of services, including transport, or even of opening training sites later.
– “Return to pot” –
But will this be enough to cover the additional costs such as that of the grandiose and unprecedented opening ceremony on the Seine? Will the updating of the security protocol between the State and the Cojo also increase this line of the budget?
Especially since many markets have not yet been concluded and “the guys are driving up prices”, explains to AFP a source familiar with the matter, who judges that “inflation has a good back”. “Everything is falling behind,” laments another source close to one of the sponsors.
The question of outsourcing or keeping the organization of the events in-house took a long time to be decided to finally arrive at “a hybrid model”. The Cojo maintains that it wasted neither time nor money.
The reserve of 300 million euros for contingencies that the Cojo has not yet touched “will partly need to be mobilized to deal with inflation”, explained last week the Minister of Sports in the Senate. “The IOC will have to get back to the pot,” says a source familiar with the matter, as he did to help Tokyo get through the Covid crisis. But, for the moment, the Cojo stubbornly denies having asked for an extension.
The Court of Auditors is also busy. As provided for in the Olympic law passed in 2018, it is responsible for submitting a report by the end of the year which will be debated in an eruptive Parliament. The president of the organizing committee Tony Estanguet recently met the president of the Assembly, the presidents of the groups and the deputies who work on the Olympic Games, according to several sources.
On the side of Solideo (company delivering Olympic works), endowed with 1.870 billion euros of public money, a first inflation figure was established at 150 million euros absorbed two-thirds by the State and one third by the communities.
