By ELSIE EYAKUZE

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Ah, gay Paris! The Summer Olympics will be taking place there in about a week’s time. In the fog of attempted assassinations, and footage from Kenya that reminds me why I prefer radio as a medium for news over television, joy has been a struggle.

There is a running joke about how the timeline in which you are reading this article is not The Good Timeline. Something happened that caused us to split off-course to the reality we are living now, complete with a second Trump candidacy and the aftermath of the Covid-19 epidemic. And a war in Ukraine.

And a genocide in Gaza. And the heat records of the planet are going up with every summer. And...

You get the point. Optimism is in short supply.

The Olympics might be of help. There was a time, not too long ago, when the world enjoyed coming together to watch obscure sports and find out who were the fastest runners in the world.

Read: EYAKUZE: Who’d have thought children would be given bullets, not bread?

Technology was friendly then, not sinister. We marvelled at the ability to watch sports in real time, from wherever we were in the world.

There wasn’t a 24-hour news cycle, thus the Olympics were some of the only times when young ones could convince their parents to let them stay up. Gymnastics at 3:00 am? Permitted!

It is dangerous to imagine the past as better than it was, but is it wrong? Nostalgia is one of my favourite moods. It is also a healthy defence against dogmatic optimists and their delusions of the shining present and future.

In 2024, the cheer and ceremony of the Olympics seem a bit outdated, so of course I love that.

A peace project on a global scale, a relic from the Before Times where people smiled even— especially - if there wasn’t a camera there to record the moment. Even the cheating made sense, a quaint form of over-enthusiastic nationalism which took this sporting event far too seriously. It’s not like having the best gymnasts in the world was going to confer economic prosperity.

I was born in a time before the 24-hour news cycle complete with perpetual advertising, and I haven’t evolved enough for that. Here’s a secret: nobody has.

The technology to feed us information has now far outstripped our capacity to consume it meaningfully. I plan to try and enjoy the Olympics, use the games as a moment of rest. Not because there aren’t very serious matters to write about and to lose sleep over, but because there are.

Thankfully, sports that depend on our biological selves still take a reasonable amount of time. There is that added appeal that this isn’t a football tournament. There will be no rabid fans, and there will be no real heartbreak either. It will be easy to ignore the advertising when the people on the screen are doing amazing things in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.

Aye, let us off to Paris then, and what I hope will be a spectacular opening ceremony. When we get back from there, the dissection of Trump’s running mate, and Rwanda’s astounding election results, will be waiting. For now, we all could do with a little champagne and accordion music, a reminder that at its best humanity is not bad at all, oui?