The mascots of the 2024 Paris Olympics have been announced, and they are….two hats. Not berets, which might first come to mind when thinking of a French chapeau. The honor instead goes to Phyrigian caps, to be called the Phryges, for short. The Phyrigian cap was a symbol of liberty during the French Revolution (and you know how that turned out.)
Here they are, the Paris 2024 Olympic mascots.
So why this incredibly odd selection, though in recent years, mascots have not been sensible and cute choices such as Amik, the beaver that was the rep of the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, or Hodori, the tiger from Seoul 1988.
According to Julie Matikhine, brand director of Paris 2024, the most important attribute for a mascot is “meaning.” Cuteness is no longer sufficient.
“We are absolutely not in an approach of symbolizing through an animal or finding the famous designer that could have an idea instead of us. Meaning comes first each time Paris 2024 is designing or creating something,” commented Julie, who said the Games wanted “a mascot with something to say.”
“To be honest, at one time we even considered that perhaps it was better not to have any mascot rather than have a mascot with no precise purpose or meaning.”
The respective Olympic mascots for Paris 2024 embody the idea of liberty “but in a cuddly way.”
Yikes.
What’s wrong with something cute that could be found in nature, such as the duck-billed platypus, kookaburra and an echidna (spiny anteater) from Sydney 2000? Many mascots were stylized, such as the 1992 Barcelona mascot Cobi,a Pyrenean mountain dog with human clothes and characteristics, and that is imaginative, rather than wacky.
The caps’ predecessor in Olympic mascot weirdness was Whatizit, later known as Izzy, the symbol of the 1996 Atlanta Games. A “product of information technology,” it was considered an unusual mascot because it was not an animal, a human figure or an object. Obviously, it started an unfortunate trend.