Paris closes the Games with a record haul

The Paris Olympics closed on 11 August with a ceremony in the Stade de France that ran, as the opening night had, on spectacle and on the deliberate lightness of a country that had been told the world was watching. The tally that the closing weekend delivered was remarkable by any measure: thirty-two world records, an Olympic record rewritten more than a hundred times, and a gold-medal count in which the United States and China finished level at forty each, the first time two delegations had shared the top of the table in the modern era. The host country, which had set its own modest target, finished fourth and seemed genuinely content with it, which is a rarer achievement at these Games than the medals.

The fortnight was, by the standards of a city that had spent months preparing to be judged, an advertisement for itself. The Seine carried the opening ceremony, the volleyball was played beneath the Eiffel Tower, the marathon ran the route of 1789, and the crowds, larger and louder than the organizers had predicted, filled the streets with the particular enthusiasm of a city that had decided, in the end, to enjoy its own party. Paris did not merely survive the Games; it used them to remind the world what it looks like on a good day, and the city on a good day is a difficult argument to answer.

The records themselves told a quieter story about the world. Swimming delivered a procession of them, and the athletics track added its share, and the performances that stood out were not only the obvious ones: the marathon that ended with the entire crowd on its feet, the relays decided by a hundredth of a second, the athletes who fell and finished anyway. The Games are always a catalogue of human possibility, and this edition, in a summer of wars and elections, offered the old proof that the body at its limits remains one of the few spectacles that needs no translation.

The politics never left the building, of course. The French government that welcomed the athletes had been in caretaker limbo since the elections in July, the country that celebrated on the banks of the Seine was the same country that had voted itself into a hung parliament three weeks earlier, and the Olympic truce that the charter asks for was, as usual, observed by nobody. What the Games supplied was not an escape but a pause, the rare interval in which a nation behaves as its better self imagines it, and the value of that interval is not that it lasts but that it happens at all.

The Games handed the baton to Los Angeles with the usual ceremony, and the usual questions travel with it. Paris proved that a city can host a giant modern Games without building a monument to waste, that the crowds will come to the streets if the streets are opened to them, and that a country in political difficulty can still organize something close to a collective triumph. Whether the lesson survives the hangover is the test the French will face in the autumn, when the parliament reconvenes and the pause that the Games provided ends; the medals have been counted, the records recorded, and the arguments of the summer, unimproved by the interval, are waiting to resume.