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  • Judging Breaking At the Olympics Is an Art, Not a Science

    Judging Breaking At the Olympics Is an Art, Not a Science

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    Back in 2017, when I was watching the breaking battles at the Silverback Open in the suburbs of Philadelphia, a B-boy drew up into a handstand. It’s a basic element, to be sure, but this dancer tweaked it by balancing on the back of his wrists, an innovation that excited the crowd surrounding the cypher.

    As I settled back down, I remember thinking, how the hell do you score that, an unexpected flip of the wrist, or any of the other spontaneous displays of creativity? The matter felt pressing because of then-recent developments.

    Just a year earlier, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had announced that breaking was being added to the roster for the 2018 Youth Olympic Games (YOG), an event often used as a testing ground for new Olympic disciplines, such as 3-on-3 basketball. If breaking did well in Buenos Aires, there was a good chance that it would make the roster for all-ages Olympic Games. And it did do well, which is why breaking makes its debut in Paris.

    The IOC selected the World DanceSport Federation (WDSF) to shepherd the dance along its Olympic trajectory, an interesting choice given that it had no prior relationship with breaking or the community that created it. The WDSF, best known for being in charge of global ballroom dance competition, had about two years to get breaking ready for its YOG debut. This meant they also had two years to develop and implement an IOC-approved judging system.

    At most battles, especially the smaller ones, the judging is a low-tech affair. There’s an odd number of judges and after everyone is done with their rounds—how many usually depends on the stage of the battle—the judges vote for the person they think won, usually by pointing. Sometimes one of the judges will cross his arms in an X to signify that he feels that the two dancers have tied. This means that they have to do another round, burning through more energy (and perhaps some moves they might’ve been saving for a later bout) so that the undecided judge can pick a side.

    These votes aren’t based on any hard and fast rules; in fact, traditionally, there’s been no rulebook at all. While there is a general consensus about some things, such as biting another B-boy’s moves (don’t do it) or touching your opponent (also don’t do it) or dancing on beat (definitely do that if you possibly can), the judges are usually evaluating the dancers according to the values of the breaking tradition—creativity, style, character, and musicality. It’s up to each individual judge, usually dancers or former dancers, how to weigh the different values in their decision.

    This probably wasn’t going to cut it at the Olympics.

    Fortunately for the WDSF, several years before the IOC’s foray into breaking, members of the community had already started building a judging system to be used at major events such as Battle of the Year. B-boy Niels “Storm” Robitsky, Kevin “Renegade” Gopie, and Dominik Fahr, founder of and8.dance, along with a handful of others, had spent years developing a unified, consistent approach to evaluating breaking, with Fahr developing the platform and technology to put it into action. After the YOG announcement, they partnered with the WDSF to fine tune their approach, which was used at the 2018 YOG. In 2022, Gopie, Robitsky, and Fahr stopped working with the WDSF. Since their departure, the WDSF developed what they’ve called the Olympic judging system, but they didn’t reinvent the wheel. The system that will be used in Paris is an alternate version of what Gopie, Robitsky, and Fahr had created.

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  • Olympic Drag Artist Nicky Doll Hits Back at Online Hate Mob

    Olympic Drag Artist Nicky Doll Hits Back at Online Hate Mob

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    After the Summer Olympics’ opening ceremony, drag artist Nicky Doll felt she was on a cloud. Her makeup had survived 45 minutes of torrential rain as she performed on a bridge over the Seine River and she’d just witnessed waacking and voguing, both dance forms with queer roots, reach a worldwide audience of billions of people.

    Back in the dressing room, which was on a boat, the mood was celebratory. “We were all so proud that in 2024, we were given the platform to be,” says Doll, known for her appearance on the reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race and as the host of Drag Race France.

    It wasn’t until the next day that Doll realized she was also at the center of an Olympic-sized backlash. French Catholic bishops decried the ceremony’s “derision and mockery of Christianity.” Donald Trump called the show “a disgrace.” Critics focused their anger on one scene, where Doll posed alongside other Drag Race artists, interpreting it as a parody of the Last Supper, a painting by Leonardo da Vinci and an important image in Christian iconography. Organizers denied that was the inspiration. But by then, it didn’t matter. The online mob had its momentum.

    On Doll’s phone, that momentum took the form of a slew of notifications. Her name was getting tagged. Personal attacks were filing into her DMs. Then came the threats: “we know where you live,” “we have guns,” “we will cut your throat.” Other performers were getting harassed, too. A special police unit dedicated to fighting hate crimes was tasked with investigating online abuse targeted at lesbian activist DJ Barbara Butch, the Paris prosecutor’s office told the Associated Press.

    “As queer people, we are used to being criticized on social media,” says Doll, who is from Marseille but now lives in New York. “But when we saw they were using religion … in order to attack us, this felt like a low blow that we didn’t see coming.”

    Behind the messages were the usual crowd of anonymous trolls, hiding behind accounts with no names or profile pictures. But among them was also Laurence Fox, a British actor turned right-wing commentator, who has become notorious for making misogynistic and homophobic comments. On the night of the opening ceremony, amid the backlash, Fox posted a video of the catwalk scene on X, calling the cast “little pedos.” The post remains visible on the platform with a fact-check label that says: “There is no evidence that any of the people in the photograph are pedophiles.”

    In response, Doll, who features in the video next to Butch, decided to sue Fox for defamation in France. “I want to sue him personally, because I want him to understand that he cannot continue to use us for his personal agenda and his words matter,” she says, “The message that he sends to his fan base matters. He’s an enabler for hate and homophobia and transphobia.” Representatives for Fox and X did not reply to WIRED’s requests for comment.

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  • NBC’s Olympics Broadcast Isn’t Just Addictive. It’s a New Era of Streaming

    NBC’s Olympics Broadcast Isn’t Just Addictive. It’s a New Era of Streaming

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    Peacock’s editorial team has adjusted and reorganized video content on the fly. Viewers and reviewers have been buzzing about Snoop Dogg’s segments, so the team set up a scrollable playlist of Snoop clips. Users have been looking for videos of the medal ceremonies, so now there’s a collection of those, too.

    Some of the new formats are fundamentally different ways to “watch TV.” With Multiview, for instance, the Olympics wash over you—less like a show, more like a state of being. Campbell says about half of Multiview users click into a specific sport, so they’re using the split-screen as a “discovery tool,” while the other half stay in the control room-style experience.

    Control is the operative word; we’re all growing increasingly comfortable with multiple screens and data sources in our faces at all times. YouTube TV, which has been offering a make-your-own multiview function since last year, has been promoting preset Olympics versions this summer. DirecTV has its own version, too. People are growing more accustomed to “using more than one screen at one time,” Campbell says.

    NBC has around 20 actual control rooms operating at any given time between Paris, New York and NBC Sports headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut. For Gold Zone, a feast for the eyes, producers in Stamford pick 16 live feeds to monitor at a time, then the directors whip around from event to event, hoping to catch every medal contest.

    Gold Zone usage more than doubled in the first few days of the games, Campbell says. Multiview has also been used by millions of subscribers. Of course, fans always want more: On Sunday a woman tweeted to @Peacock, asking about the LA Olympics in 2028: “can we make a custom multi view where you can choose the four things you watch?” (NBC won’t commit to that, but I bet it is in the works already.)

    As I spoke with Solomon, I realized that I had not watched a single minute of NBC’s traditional prime time TV coverage. And she’s okay with that! When I asked her to define success in 2024 from NBC’s perspective, she said “success is the audience engaging with the Olympics on social; on television platforms; streaming on Peacock. And that’s why we’ve given them all different flavors of the Olympics. Find what satisfies you, and as long as you’re with us in some form on some platform, it’s a success.”

    Because NBC has your attention and thus so do the company’s advertisers. The medium previously known as television is becoming more and more like a never-ending Instagram scroll. But some moments (like Team USA’s dominance in Paris) are still big enough to capture almost everyone’s fragmented attention. “In the end,” Solomon says, “we’re all watching the same team.”

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  • Public Health Experts Want the Olympics to Drop Its Oldest Sponsor

    Public Health Experts Want the Olympics to Drop Its Oldest Sponsor

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    Since then, every Summer and Winter Olympics has adopted a strict smoke-free policy and, since 2010, a complete tobacco-free policy. Smoking is not permitted at any Paris 2024 venues except in designated areas—a rule that extends to vaping.

    Alcoholic beverage companies are another category of controversial Olympic sponsors, from Molson Brewery at the 1976 Montreal Olympics to Heineken at the 2004 Athens games.

    Though the IOC is partnered with AB InBev, the world’s leading brewer, Corona Cero—a zero-alcohol drink—is the global beer sponsor of the Paris Olympics. The Olympic Committee says this highlights both organizations’ “commitment to responsible consumption and a better world.”

    Efforts like the Kick Big Soda Out of Sport campaign aren’t coming out of nowhere. In the 2012 London Olympics, Coca-Cola’s sponsorship, which featured various promotional activities focused on youth engagement, faced significant backlash. And in 2021, the company’s sponsorship changed; Coca-Cola now has a joint “Olympic Partner,” or TOP, agreement with Mengniu, a Chinese dairy-product company, that makes them the exclusive non-alcoholic beverage sponsors of the Games. (The TOP programme is the Olympics’ highest level of sponsorship.)

    “Coca-Cola gets positively connected with a dairy food company and the ‘health halo’ that comes with that,” says Joe Piggin, senior lecturer in sport Policy at Loughborough University. Therefore, though a joint sponsorship may seem to lessen the significance of Coca-Cola’s funding, strategically this move actually leverages the company’s sponsorship and future longevity.

    From 2021 to 2032 (when their contract is up), the joint sponsors will pay an estimated total of $3 billion to the IOC. Coca-Cola’s 14-person athlete roster was revealed in the lead up to the 2024 games. The face of this campaign is this image, in which the athletes hold bottles of Coca-Cola’s drinks. Certain athletes hold full-sugar Coca-Cola itself, which has 53 grams of sugar per 500ml—almost double the recommended daily sugar intake for an adult.

    Many of the athletes hold Powerade Original, another of Coca-Cola’s drinks, which contains 5.8 grams of sugar per 600ml bottle, almost 20% of recommended daily intake. (Powerade is also the official drink of the US Olympic team.)

    Experts have said that this marketing strategy mirrors Olympians of the past hawking cigarettes. A recent project by the Centre For the Study of Tobacco and Society investigated this, noting that Harold “Dutch” Smith, a high-diving champion, was quoted in a 1935 Saturday Evening Post ad saying “Camels don’t get your wind.”

    “If a cigarette company tried to run a commercial on network TV during the Olympics, there would be such an outcry. It [should be] no different for Coca-Cola,” says Lustig. (“The Coca-Cola Company provides a wide range of beverage options that include dairy and juice drinks as well as water, tea, coffee, and sparkling beverages, with many sugar-free options available,” an IOC spokesperson tells WIRED.)

    “We urge sports organizations to stop promoting unhealthy food and drink and work with health experts to create a healthier food environment,” Zoe Davies, a nutritionist from Action on Sugar said in a statement issued to WIRED.

    Coca-Cola did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. ”The company has used its front groups to advance the argument that the lack of physical exercise and not its sugary drinks are fueling an obesity crisis,” says researcher Ashka Naik from Corporate Responsibility. However, Coca-Cola has been criticized for its manipulation of science to justify this shifting of blame.

    Experts that WIRED spoke with consistently held that Coca-Cola should be the next Olympic sponsor to go; however, they don’t expect this to happen any time soon.

    Many experts suggested a shift shouldn’t be left to the organizations themselves. In order to stop sports organizations from “taking money from ultra-processed food companies,” there must be “public policy measures,” says Lustig. “When there are more votes than dollars, that’s when things will change.”

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  • AI Is Heating the Olympic Pool

    AI Is Heating the Olympic Pool

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    In the suburbs of northeast Paris there is a giant terracotta-colored warehouse, with a labyrinth of windowless corridors inside. A deafening whir emanates from behind rows and rows of anonymous gray doors and under white strip lights, disposable earbuds are available to protect passers-by from the noise.

    These are the uncanny innards of one of France’s newest data centers, completed earlier this year, which is now being used to heat the new Olympic Aquatics Center—visible from the data center’s roof. When US swimming star Katie Ledecky won her ninth Olympic gold medal last week, she did it by speeding through water heated, at least in part, by the data center’s machinery.

    Known as PA10, this noisy site belongs to the American data center company Equinix—the whirring sound is the company’s cooling systems trying to lower the temperature of its clients’ computer servers. “PA10 is especially made for high density racks,” says the site’s data center engineer Imane Erraji, pointing to a tower of servers capable of training AI.

    For the past month, the data center has turned its hot air waste into water and piped it to a local energy system run by French utility company Engie. Once it runs at full capacity, Equinix expects to export 6.6 thermal megawatts of heat out of the building—the equivalent of more than 1,000 homes.

    As projections suggest AI is about to turbocharge the amount of electricity data centers need—Equinix predicts power consumption per rack could rise by as much as 400 percent—PA10 reflects a European phenomenon whereby officials attempt to mitigate the environmental impact of the coming AI energy crunch and transform data centers into part of the infrastructure keeping cities warm.

    Erraji describes the project as a “win-win situation” for both Equinix and the local suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis. Equinix can pipe the heat out of the building so its cooling devices don’t have to work so hard, she explains, while the city gets a cheap source of heat produced locally. After the project received a €2 million ($2.1m) investment from the city of Paris, Equinix has committed to providing the energy free-of-charge for 15 years. In June, mayor of Seine-Saint-Denis, Mathieu Hanotin, also called attention to the environmental benefits, claiming that using the data center as an energy source will spare the region 1,800 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year.

    Yet France has a “very low-carbon electricity mix,” according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), with 62 percent of its electricity generated by nuclear power. And critics say multiplying heat-reuse projects are a distraction from the real issue: the amount of land, water and electricity data centers consume. “When the data centers are already here, of course it’s better to reuse the heat than do nothing,” says Anne-Laure Ligozat, computer science professor at France’s National School of Computer Science for Industry and Business (ENSIIE.) “But the problem is the number of data centers and their energy consumption.” There would be less of an environmental impact to to have a basic electricity heating system without the data center, she adds.

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  • No, the Seine Cleanup Wasn’t a Failure

    No, the Seine Cleanup Wasn’t a Failure

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    Despite the creation of multiple stormwater reservoirs, like the Bassin d’Austerlitz, which collect stormwater and slowly release it after the bad weather has passed, if enough rain is concentrated into a small enough time, not everything that falls from the sky can be captured. In such a situation, runoff water has to be released into the river, driving up bacterial levels.

    “[Weather] variability due to climate change is a major issue, and this will only make things more difficult,” says Dan Angelescu, CEO of water-monitoring start-up Fluidion at a July 31 press conference at the company’s office in Alfortville, just outside Paris. The company makes remote water-sampling devices that beam their readings back to a central base, and it has been working with Paris authorities since 2016 providing water analysis at the Bassin de la Villette reservoir, a separate swimming site in the north of Paris that is already open for public swimming.

    “If new projects to collect waterway runoff are not carried out in the coming years, it is highly likely that the swimmability of the Seine and the opening of recreational and sports areas will depend on weather events, with swimming bans following rainy days,” says Loïs Mougin, a doctoral researcher in exercise and environmental physiology at the School of Sport, Exercise, and Health Science at Loughborough University.

    Even without a rise in extreme weather, keeping the Seine clean enough to swim in in the face of normal weather events—such as regular summer rain—is a big challenge, says Jean-Marie Mouchel, professor of hydrology at the Sorbonne University. “There are also plenty of non-exceptional weather events that have an impact on the water quality. We need to make the system more efficient at improving water quality in the face of these.” Water-quality data from last summer backs up this point. The Seine was unswimmable roughly 30 percent of the time—but Paris wasn’t enduring extreme rainfall a third of the time.

    Experts argue that how water-monitoring is done, and what information is shared with the public and when, also has to improve. “It is crucial that bacteriological data be published daily, along with information on the associated risks,” Mougin says. These include the potential for gastrointestinal issues and eye and skin infections.

    “Monitoring is going to become critical,” Angelescu says. “Having technology that’s able to monitor the right risk, measure the actual risk coming from all the bacteria, and provide results fast is going to be extremely important.” Conventional monitoring methods, which were used to make decisions for the triathlon (and didn’t involve Fluidon), involve taking samples from the river and sending them to a lab—a process that is far slower than the real-time monitoring.

    So separately, Fluidon has been trialing its technology at the triathlon site near the Alexandre III bridge throughout the Games, focusing on levels of the E. coli bacteria, to show how a quicker system that involves on-site processing might perform in the river. It has been publishing its results in near real time on an open data site, and says its technology provides a more accurate and up-to-date picture of water conditions.

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  • Tuariki Delamere’s Somersault Could Have Launched a New Era in the Olympic Long Jump

    Tuariki Delamere’s Somersault Could Have Launched a New Era in the Olympic Long Jump

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    However, since this force is applied at the feet, far from the center of mass (r > 0), it’s going to produce a torque. In this case, the torque would cause a forward angular acceleration, tending to deposit the jumper face down in the sand.

    So athletes use a few different techniques to counter this rotation. The first is to lean back in the jump—this moves the center of mass closer to the contact point of the foot, thus reducing torque. But it also slows you down. Another is the hang technique, where the jumper extends their arms and legs like a giant sail in the air. As we’ve seen, that increases their moment of inertia, perhaps at the cost of some extra wind drag.

    The method used by most Olympic athletes is the hitch kick (shown here by Carl Lewis, who won four gold medals in the event). It looks like the jumper is running in the air, “windmilling” their arms and legs as they fly. What this does is transfer the rotation of the body into a rotation of the arms and legs. (Technically, it’s a form of conservation of angular momentum.) People often think this running motion makes the jumper go farther, but it doesn’t—with traditional techniques, your distance is pretty much set once you take off, just as in our ball model above. It’s all to fight the rotation so you can stick the landing.

    The Somersault Jump

    Tuariki Delamere’s approach was radically different. Instead of trying to fight the rotation, he said, why not go with the flow and use that rotation? If you lean forward as the back foot pushes off, you can produce even more torque—and maybe more jumping force too. After that, you could just continue the rotation until you land on your feet … hopefully.

    But wait! There’s another benefit too. If the jumper tucks their knees in toward their chest, this will increase their angular velocity (just like the ice skater above). This would also give them a smaller cross-sectional area in flight, reducing air drag. The effect would be small, but remember: Small differences can win a gold medal.

    There’s another cool benefit of the somersault long jump. As the athlete rotates in the air, the tucked position brings the feet forward quickly to make contact with the ground in front of the jumper. If you do it right, you’d then roll forward so you don’t fall back on your seat or hands.

    Delamere’s technique might have added significant distance to long jumps. Many experts think it could have broken the 30-foot mark. (The world record is 29 feet, 4 inches.) But he was never given the chance, because the sporting authorities said it was too dangerous. Evidently they’d never seen gymnastics or ski jumping.

    My opinion? Old-timers in track and field cared more about their traditions and had no time for impudent flash and creativity—especially if it left hallowed records in the dust. Maybe that’ll change. Who knows? After all, breakdancing is now an Olympic event!

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  • The Shameful Controversy Over Olympic Boxer Imane Khelif

    The Shameful Controversy Over Olympic Boxer Imane Khelif

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    This story was originally published in WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.

    Algerian boxer Imane Khelif won her first match of the 2024 Paris Olympics when her opponent, Angela Carini of Italy, quit after taking several blows to the face in the opening seconds of the bout. The victory only fueled the misguided controversy around Khelif, who has been targeted by critics who have misgendered her throughout the Games.

    Born in 1999 in Tiaret, Algeria, Khelif has been boxing since she was a child and has always competed in women’s categories. In her career, she competed in the Women’s World Boxing Championships in New Delhi in 2018 (finishing in 17th place), then competed in Russia the following year. She competed in the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, reaching all the way to the quarterfinals, and she finished second in the 2022 Women’s World Championships in Istanbul.

    Everything seemed to be running smoothly until the 2023 World Cup, organized by the International Boxing Association. The Russia-led IBA, which is not recognized by the International Olympic Committee, disqualified Khelif after a gender eligibility test allegedly found she has XY chromosomes. IBA president Umar Kremlev has said that both Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-ting, who allegedly had a similar test result, “were trying to deceive their colleagues and pretend to be women.” Khelif has contested the allegations.

    The Olympics Controversy

    Both Khelif and Lin were admitted to Olympic boxing competitions. Admission rules in this case are handled by the so-called Boxing Unit, which has ensured that all athletes participating in the Games’ boxing tournament comply with the rules of eligibility and registration for the competition as well as all medical regulations, which also includes the appropriate demonstration of medical certificates stamped and verified to at least three months before the start of the competitions.

    “These boxers are completely eligible. They are women on their passports, they are women who have competed in the Tokyo Olympics and have been competing for many years, I think we all have a responsibility to tone it down and not turn it into a witch hunt,” said IOC spokesperson Mark Adams, at a news conference on Tuesday.

    Still, prominent figures on social media decried Khelif’s participation in the Games. X owner Elon Musk amplified a tweet from swimmer Riley Gaines that “men don’t belong in women’s sports,” while author J.K. Rowling falsely referred to Khelif as “a male who’s knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head.”

    The fact is that Khelif is participating in the Games because she is allowed to by the rules, and has passed the IOC’s standards. “The current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision,” said the Boxing Unit and IOC in a statement Thursday, referring to the IBA ban. “[It] was taken without any proper procedure—especially considering that these athletes had been competing in top-level competition for many years. Such an approach is contrary to good governance.”

    The controversies of the past few days took serious issues such as hyperandrogynism—the excessive production of testosterone by female bodies—and intersexuality, in which someone is born with sex characteristics that don’t fit neatly into traditional definitions of male and female, and debased them. They then further poisoned an already very sensitive debate around transgender women’s participation in the Olympics and sports competitions in general.

    Beyond everything, however, the fact remains that Imane Khelif has always defined herself as a woman and the IOC is allowing her participate in the Olympics as such. Even in the face of assaultive public opinion, there is nothing to add.

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  • The Incredible Physics of Simone Biles’ Yurchenko Double Pike

    The Incredible Physics of Simone Biles’ Yurchenko Double Pike

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    A gymnast can actually perform both of these types of rotation at the same time—that’s what makes the sport so interesting to watch. In physics, we would call this type of movement a “rigid body rotation.” But, clearly, humans aren’t rigid, so the mathematics to describe rotations like this can be quite complicated. For the sake of brevity, let’s limit our discussion just to flips.

    There are three kinds of flips. There is a layout, in which the gymnast keeps their body in a straight position. There is a pike, in which they bend at about a 90-degree angle at the hips. Finally, there is a tuck, with the knees pulled up towards the chest.

    What’s the difference, in terms of physics?

    Rotations and the Moment of Inertia

    If you want to understand the physics of a rotation, you need to consider the moment of inertia. I know that’s a strange-sounding term. Let’s start with an example involving boats. (Yes, boats.)

    Suppose you’re standing on a dock next to a small boat that’s just floating there, and isn’t tied up. If you put your foot onto the boat and push it, what happens? Yes, the boat moves away—but it does something else. The boat also speeds up as it moves away. This change in speed is an acceleration.

    Now imagine that you move along the dock and pick a much larger boat, like a yacht. If you put your foot on it and push it, using the same force for the same amount of time as you did for the smaller boat, does it move? Yes, it does. However, it doesn’t increase in speed as much as the smaller boat because it has a larger mass.

    The key property in this example is the boat’s mass. With more mass, it’s more difficult to change an object’s motion. Sometimes we call this property of objects the inertia (which is not to be confused with the moment of inertia—we will get to that soon).

    When you push on the boat, we can describe this force-motion interaction with a form of Newton’s Second Law. It looks like this:

    Newton second equations

    Illustration: Rhett Allain

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  • Airbnb’s Olympics Push Could Help it Win Over Paris

    Airbnb’s Olympics Push Could Help it Win Over Paris

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    Short-term rentals can function as a quick release valve for a city expecting an influx of visitors, increasing capacity for a short time nearly instantly. In fact, despite the usual hype around the Olympic Games, there are still many places to stay in Paris this summer.

    A search on Airbnb for a two-person stay during the first weekend of the games returned more than 1,000 results, with many charging less than $200 a night. A search for hotel rooms on Expedia only turned up about 20 hotels offering similarly low rates. Hotel prices for the dates of the Olympics have actually fallen in Paris since December, but remain higher than the same time last summer, with the average cost of a hotel room during the opening weekend of the games going for around 440 euros as of May.

    Booking rates for short-term rentals during the Olympics are up by 8 percent compared to the dates two weeks before the games across all locations hosting Olympic events, but the number of available rooms has increased by 38 percent, according to AirDNA, a third party platform that tracks short-term rentals.

    The average price in Paris for a short-term rental during the Olympics is $481 a night, while those who booked earlier paid an average of $350. Outside of Paris, rates average $289, up from a previous $198. The “vast majority” of these listings on Airbnb, says Stephenson, come from families listing their primary homes. But other Parisians are begging travelers to stay away, warning that the games will bring chaos to the city, and some are planning to flee the city.

    People from more than 160 countries and regions have booked stays on Airbnb for the Olympics, according to the company. The largest influx of tourists comes from the US, with American travelers making up 20 percent of the bookings, with many other guests coming from the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands.

    Against that background, and with Airbnb’s marketing push, Jamie Lane, chief economist and senior vice president of research of AirDNA, says it makes sense that more people are signing up with Airbnb to host. “Everyone starts getting Olympic fever,” he says, especially “with Airbnb doing more and more ads and market outreach within the city of Paris.”

    Despite the flood of visitors, the ready availability of vacancies suggests that like many athletes competinging in Paris, some Airbnb hosts will end the games with disappointment as their listings remained unbooked. But Lane says that in the past large events have been seen to provide a lasting boost to Airbnb’s footprint in a place. “A city is left with more listings than it had going in,” Lane says. For “people that maybe decide to do it for the first time, it ends up being a good experience. It was very little work. They think: ‘I should do this again.’”

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