France Inc rallies to 2024 Olympic sponsorship banner

In early June, when the five giant Olympic rings were hoisted on to Paris’s Eiffel Tower ahead of this summer’s games, few will have celebrated the moment as much as steel group ArcelorMittal.

After a race to deliver 2,000 torches — made from scrap metal in its French factories — to relay the Olympic flame across France, the delivery of the recycled-steel rings brought ArcelorMittal’s part of a vast logistics programme ahead of the Olympics and Paralympics to a head.

As in the case of the other companies in France that have rallied behind the cause of Paris 2024 sponsorship, the Olympics have brought both visibility and pressure. Many have been asked not just to provide funding, but also to participate in operations.

From sportswear group Decathlon, which is making outfits for the games’ mass of volunteer workers as well as organising their handout, to supermarket giant Carrefour, which will deliver fresh produce for athletes’ meals, the onus on French sponsors has been to keep distribution loops as local as possible as part of a goal to halve this games’ carbon footprint.

The drive has its benefits, of course, for France Inc, too. It has allowed its members to highlight parts of their operations they are not always known for and their sustainability drives.

“When we took the contract, we took it as a challenge,” says Eric Niedziela, chair of ArcelorMittal France — though headquartered in Luxembourg, the ArcelorMittal Group has many French plants. As part of that challenge, the company wanted to demonstrate, Niedziela adds, what it was able to do in terms of decarbonising steel.

Using scrap from such as old cars, Arcelor forged the steel for the torches in ovens fired by electricity rather than gas. Increasing electricity usage in such processes — steel production accounts for about eight per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions — is required to move the industry along the track towards net zero.

Rallying local sponsors — beyond the multinationals that are high level International Olympic Committee partners like Coca-Cola, Toyota or Airbnb — has been primarily a means of helping Paris 2024 balance its budget. Organisers had pledged to minimise the drag on state coffers, with roughly a third of Paris 2024’s €4.4bn in funds coming from sponsors and the rest from ticket sales, hospitality and the IOC.

Several executives have told the Financial Times that their talks, on the question of sponsorship, with Tony Estanguet, head of the Paris 2024 organising committee and a former Olympic canoeist and gold medallist began two years ago. Luxury goods group LVMH, whose brands have designed medals and French athletes’ outfits, was one of the last to sign up with an agreement, months in the making, in July 2023 worth about €150mn, people close to the deal said.

For many, the visibility afforded by the games was too good an opportunity to be passed up. “It was obvious to us we had to take part, this is an event that happens every 100 years in France,” says Tanya Saadé Zeenny, executive officer at shipping group CMA CGM in charge of communications and its charitable foundation. The Marseille-based company has backed the games financially and, with its CEVA logistics arm, transported equipment and infrastructure — anything from trampolines and javelins to beds for athletes and seating to be built into temporary venues in Paris — from more than 200 countries. That’s as well as horses for South Korea’s equestrian contenders.

“They needed a lot of guarantees,” Saadé Zeenny says of the organisers’ requirements. As in the cases of other sponsors, CMA CGM’s pitch led on a greener approach, with its ships running on lower-emissions fuels. It also hired people from disadvantaged backgrounds, or who were looking to retrain professionally, when it recruited 800 extra staff for the games.

The sustainability drive has brought experiments with it. Stadiums are often powered by diesel-fuelled generators to minimise the risk of power cuts. Enedis, another big sponsor and a subsidiary of state-owned electricity utility EDF, has instead connected the Olympics’ sites to the main grid, with power for the games coming from renewable sources.

While Olympic Games executive director Christophe Dubi underlines that sponsors have been “absolutely critical for funding”, their role is also to drum up enthusiasm. This has been not least in Paris, where locals have complained about potential disruptions to life caused by the games and high ticket prices. From Carrefour stores stocking up with merchandising, to sponsors running excited TV ads with home athletes, “the result of this, and it’s the more romantic piece of it, is that it gives the local flavour,” Dubi says: “it’s the food, it’s the music, it’s the clothing.”