This summer, nearly four billion people around the world tuned in to watch the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. It was a particularly special moment for the city, as Paris marked the centennial of its hosting of the 1924 Olympics. As the City of Light prepared for this massive international event, 24 Spartans got a behind the scenes look.
The students traveled to Paris and Rome from late May through the end of June as part of an experiential study abroad. The trip was led by Joanne Gerstner, the Brandt Fellow Sports Journalist in Residence in the School of Journalism. It was her fourth time leading the program, and Gerstner says this one offered a particularly powerful lesson as the eyes of the world converged on Paris for the Olympics.
“The focus is on taking our students who are very well versed in American sports media into a whole new world where there's more going on than just football and basketball,” Gerstner said. “I really tried to leverage and maximize the opportunities that were in front of us. The power of experiencing things when you're touching it, tasting it, feeling it in real time is more than anything that can ever be done here in a classroom.”
During the nearly month-long study, students met with sports journalists, editors, executives and analysts, attended the French Open tennis tournament and met with Olympians…some of whom brought their medals for all to see.
“It was very much a living laboratory,” Gerstner said.
The trip included a visit to Eurosport, the massive group of television networks broadcasting across the betboom sports bettingcontinent and into parts of Asia. The sheer magnitude of this technical operation was not lost on Ethan Hunter, a senior majoring in journalism and digital storytelling. Hunter is honing his skills working for Big Ten Plus in East Lansing. He’s seen control rooms before…but Paris was next level.
“Eurosport was getting ready to broadcast the Olympics to 52 countries in about 30 different languages,” Hunter said. “To have one company that’s broadcasting to an entire continent was unfathomable to me. You could see the screen for every country that was getting a live feed, plus streaming only options. There were well over 100 broadcasts happening out of this one building.”
The second half of the program took the MSU students to Rome, site of the 1960 Summer Olympics. Here, 18-year-old boxer Cassius Clay, whom the world would later know as Muhammad Ali, won the gold in the light heavyweight division. While the glory of those games still burns in its memory, Rome also echoes with the rhetoric of an earlier era, when a dark political message spread through its ancient streets.
Benito Mussolini ruled Italy for nearly two decades as its infamous fascist dictator before his execution in 1945. A former journalist, Mussolini was an avid (European) football fan who wove sports into his own interpretation of nationalistic pride. Much of that old propaganda still permeates everyday life in Rome.
“At the Italian Olympic headquarters, we saw a giant monolith that says “Mussolini” down the side,” Hunter said. “They’re still very tied to their World War II past. There’s a building with all these statues that were supposed to represent the ‘model’ Italian citizen. Mussolini wanted them to show strength and intelligence and all those sorts of things. But when you start thinking about who wasn’t the model citizen, then you start raising some questions.”
“There’s a lot of coding of nationalism mixed with sports mixed with, frankly, betboom dacha dubaithe things that we’re trying to stop in this world, such as hate and prejudice,” said Gerstner. “The Olympics are not always about the gold medal. It’s also about projecting a nation’s values and what people want to express in the world, good or bad.”
This leg of the trip demonstrated to the students a unique juxtaposition of ideals. Deep within the city’s borders, the independent state of Vatican City emanated with a different tone. In 2020, Gerstner learned the seat of the Roman Catholic Church includes a sports department, the Athletica Vaticani. She and her students made their first visit to the department two years later. The relationships she fostered there led to an invitation in 2024 to visit the Holy See’s Dicastery For the Laity, Family and Life, which also oversees sports programming.
“We had an amazing visit with a number of Vatican officials that really see sports as a way of communicating good human values regardless of religious affiliation,” said Gerstner. “Like, how do we teach people to respect each other? How do we teach people to laugh with each other? How do we help people get healthier?”
Throughout the trip, the students tackled daily assignments ranging from sports reporting to observation to analysis. Gerstner says she hopes each trip gives them a moment to question the lens through which they see the world. That seemed to be the case for Hunter.
“I’m part Italian, so I was most excited about going to Italy,” Hunter said. “But honestly, I came away from that trip thinking that Paris is some place where I could live and work. Going to AFP (Agence France-Presse) and seeing real news happen, and then going to Eurosport and watching an incredible conglomeration of sports and live production was truly something that I will be thinking about. It was amazing to see how many jobs there are in the industry that I never would have thought about because I never would have thought about going to Europe. Also, betboom teameverybody there was speaking English to each other. I had no idea about that until then.”
“This was the greatest trip ever,” he said. “I couldn’t have had a better trip if I was there just on vacation.”