The 2024 Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games aim to be the greenest in history: ‘The era of gigantism is over’, says its organising committee, promising to prioritise reuse of existing venues rather than grand new commissions. But, as Sven Daniel Wolfe writes in this issue’s keynote, ‘The Olympics are unlikely to ever be authentically sustainable until we subtract profit from the equation.’ Other ways of catering for sports are possible, offered by architects past and present across this issue. Sports are always political; and sports persist, even when architects and planners fail to cater for them.
