Paris Olympics: Vol. II

I returned to Paris to get ready for wrestling to begin

I took a couple of trains to get back to Paris from Normandy on Thursday so I could work on a few things here before wrestling kicks off on Monday, August 5th. Here’s a very quick montage of my trip:

The first order of business was testing out my commute. The way they allocated hotel rooms to media wasn’t very accommodating to a small-time freelancer covering one sport like myself. I tried to get a closer hotel by reaching out to the Olympic organizers in charge of such things, but to no avail.¹

One of the buses I took today. I always find it interesting when the buggy software in foreign countries comes out in English instead of the local language. It’s also interesting that these displays are run by computers that have real software and aren’t just dummy displays with no underlying operating system.

Normally, when I have control over my own bookings, I’m usually within a few minutes walk to the venue. I prioritize being close to the arena so I can waste as little time getting to and from as possible. The often 18-hour working days don’t mesh well with long transportation requirements. I also don’t particularly enjoy carrying the 70-or-so pounds of equipment I typically lug around every day. So in an ideal world, I’m within 1/2 of a mile at the most. Except for Oslo in 2021, which was quirky because of Covid, the furthest I’ve been away from the world championship venue is .85 miles in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan.² That was about a 15 minute walk.

Camera gear in the backpack, computer equipment in the front pack. This is how I always travel to photograph events. I often carry a couple light stands with me, too. It’s not light. This is outside the entrance at the Champ De Mars Arena, where the wrestling is taking place. You can see the tippy-top of La Tour Eiffel in the center.

Well, in my trial run today, it took me 47 minutes to leave my hotel room, walk to the subway, take two trains, and then get through security at the arena. Yeesh.

The difference here though, is that there are fewer weight classes and far fewer entrants per weight. Whereas in non-Olympic years, the world championship features 10 weight classes in each of the three styles (men’s and women’s freestyle, and men’s Greco-Roman), and can have upwards of 45 wrestlers per weight, the Olympics feature only 6 weights per style and they generally have 16 wrestlers per weight.³ So that means a fraction of the matches will need to be wrestled and the actual time spent photographing will be significantly lower than normal. So that will help make the days manageable.

The underside scaffolding of the bleachers inside the Champ De Mars Arena.

All that said, I’m going to experiment a little more with the commute and see if I can shave some time off. Hopefully I won’t have to spend so much time getting to the arena and back.

---

Here are some photos of my meanderings today.

I love the layers of buildings in these old cities. The density and variety is lovely.

So much character in the doors and the interiors. Look at the tile floor pattern!

I was struck by how the woman’s dress and her dog both matched the building they were walking in front of.

I did a double take when I walked by this tiny dog park that’s essentially a public restroom for canines. It even has a lone stump post to pull up next to.

There are a lot of closed up storefronts in this part of the city. But clearly a lot of people live around here. It makes me think about the ebb and flow of larger economic issues and the way cities evolve over hundreds of years.

I’ve always loved these courtyard areas between buildings.

That’s an excellent price for avocados, relative to NYC where I live. I wonder if that’s typical for here. I didn’t see any other stands on my walk. May revisit this later.

I stopped in a book & coffee shop while I was walking around and noticed that French-language books have the spine printing running bottom-to-top and English-language books read top-to-bottom.

Sidewalk libraries are great, too.

I absolutely love how many old, tiny cars there are puttering around European cities.

I’ve been to Paris a couple of times, but I’ve never seen the Arc de Triomphe. Now I have! First time to the Champs-Élysées, too.

New York City is debating putting up some of these track protectors after a public groundswell of fear over people being pushed onto tracks. Very few of the stations I passed through have them here, but this one does.

This Metro station had ample seating for passengers waiting for the train.

After passing through security, I got my first full sight of the Eiffel Tower, which is behind the wrestling venue. In between is an athlete warmup area, a volunteer mess hall, an Olympic Family center, and the media workroom, which is in a completely different building than the competition venue. All of these facilities are temporary and will be removed sometime after the Games.

Inside the Team USA office at the Main Press Centre, they have a wall where they post photos and details of all the US medalists.

This is the Judo setup at the Champ De Mars Arena. Over the weekend, they will convert it over to wrestling for Monday’s start.

---

All of the above were taken with my phone. I don’t usually post them as “real images”⁴ but it was a good exercise in being less conspicuous and making use of a less cumbersome camera. I did break out the “real camera” for one opportunity, and that was from the stands at the beach volleyball arena. My phone just couldn’t compete with the versatility of the multiple lenses, the resolution and fidelity of the resulting files, and the accuracy with which I could click the shutter based on what was happening in front of me. Different tools have different strengths and are better suited for different tasks. Here’s what I came up with.

Thanks again to Bill Bain (bainphotos.com) for lending me his 8-15mm. Just so much fun.

At first, I had my 17-40mm lens on the camera, but it didn’t have quite the expanse that I was looking for. So I broke out the fisheye…

All the way zoomed out, this is what an 8mm frame looks like. That in and of itself is kind of fun…

But then you can modify the lens correction profile settings in Lightroom to come up with something a little more conventional, albeit in an unconventional way.

---

And that’s a wrap! I will likely not be able to make posts this long everyday of the Games, but I plan on posting batches of photos at least. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks for reading!

1. The other option was to forgo the media hotel process and find something myself. Unfortunately, at the time I had to make that decision, other hotels and Airbnb prices were crazy and would have made it unworkable for me to afford to attend. It turned out that so many people avoided Paris during the Olympics that prices ended up coming down to something that might have worked, but by that point, I was already bought in to the room I got. C’est la vie.

2. It was called Nur-Sultan when we were there. It was called Astana before that, and it had been changed just before the championships were held. In fact, when they had chosen the city as the host less than a year prior, it was still named Astana. And in the time since, they’ve changed it back to Astana.

3. The qualification process was the same for each weight and it resulted in 16 wrestlers each. However, due to some additions for the Refugee Team that were granted quotas by the IOC outside of that process, and some confusion about whether or not Russian and Belarussian athletes would be competing, there are a few weights that will have up to two more.

4. I’ve had a whole philosophy about this that I might explore more in depth at a later point.