Earlier today, the name of the Chinese-owned cargo ship that’s gonna host competitors and officials at Teahupoo for the Paris Games was named, details given and so on.
The Aranui 5, which makes a 12-day circuit of French Polynesia every month, has been described as “the Pacific’s strangest cruise ship” and “the weird offspring of a love affair between a cargo freighter and a passenger liner.”
It ain’t luxury by any stretch but a serviceable and pleasant enough joint to spend a couple of weeks on and necessary after a local Teahupoo hotel, which had been shut for 26 years, was unable be readied in time.
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Locals, you’ll remember, are worried Teahupoo’s gonna get flattened by the Olympic influx.
If you’ve ever been to this town of fifteen-hundred souls at the literal end of the road in Tahiti-iti, seventy clicks or so from the capital Papeete, you’ll know what a low-fi place it is outside of the annual WSL event there when the only noise you’ll hear is the great swoosh of water as Filipe reverse paddles into a set.
Anyway, as an aside to the announcement of the boat, Tahiti’s Minister of Youth and Sports Nahema Temarii said that the old wooden judging tower is gonna be torn down and replaced by a magnificent aluminium structure at a cost of €4.6 million or £3.9 million/$US5.1 million.
Necessary, I suppose, the old tower is rickety as hell, and who wants to be responsible for officials plunging to their doom after a cross-beam snaps and brings the whole thing down, but a little rich, don’t you think, given that Paris 2024 has positioned itself as the “sustainable” Games.
But, then, what does sustainable mean in modern parlance?
From what I can tell, it means you make clothing or hardwoods in China, Bangladesh or wherever, paying extra to greasy figures for “carbon friendly” factories and for various environmental certifications before wrapping the final product in brown paper and placing a sticker on the paper fold announcing your climate-friendly bona fides.
Contest runs July 27 to July 30. Either gonna be epic or not.
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