These Are The Only Things You Need from the Paris 2024 Merch Shop

Yeah, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah, there are some very smart polo shirts and baseball caps for sale. Ugh, yes, we hear you, you’ll look great wearing those at the yard and you’ll feel incredibly smug every time someone catches a glimpse of that telltale little logo that says “hi, yes, hello, it’s me, a person who somehow gamed the Olympic ticketing system and got to go to Paris IN PERSON. Please use the formal vous if you must address me”. (They don’t, obviously, say this literally, otherwise we’d be buying them.)

You can, of course, get those. Go hog wild! Fill your basket with souvenirs! We cannot judge – we began pre-merching at quarter to one in the morning at a French motorway service station last October, and felt the cold judgement of the woman behind the till when we dared to express joy over a Paris 2024 snowglobe. We still find joy in it. It’s fine.

But you’ll be doing yourself a great injustice if you just go for the big ticket, page one, front-of-the-shop souvenirs at the Olympics. Instead, we reckon you’ll get the most mileage out of the slightly weird offerings. Offerings such as…

This inexplicable pigeon pin – £7

Pin-trading is the pastime of the Games: athletes trade their national pins with one another in the catering area of the Olympic Village, media representatives do the same in the press centre between filing deadlines, and fans, too, take part in this heartwarming showcase of international collaboration. And now, apparently, it’s time for the sky rats to get in on it, too. For £7, you can pre-empt the pigeon hustle and get those unblinking beady eyes on your lanyard from day one.

We particularly enjoy that this one is considered a ‘Paris Essentiel’. Did a pigeon categorise the merch site?

A hat that will look deeply silly on everyone – £22

We love a bucket hat. It’s the quickest route we can imagine to looking like you’ve just recreationally taken a bunch of horse tranquilisers and are now being invited on stage to join in with a rousing rendition of ‘Thiago Silva’ by Dave. Which is, of course, exactly the sort of vibe we all like to have while ringside at the most prestigious sporting event of the year. Let your freak flags fly, but maybe leave the tranquillisers at home.

The accessory that’ll make everyone in the city hate you – £17

There’s one target market for this beret, and that’s Emily in Paris fans. Interestingly, there’s also one flavour of tourist that really sparks the Parisian desire to burn everything down, and that is also Emily in Paris fans. Wear at your own risk, and pair with a high-vis vest to really confuse your attackers.

This pen, which will jot down the interview of the century, mark our words – £7

Speaking of prestige, and of the gravitas of the Games, get your eyeballs around this pen, which we’re going to pre-merch just in case everyone else beats us to the official shop. Imagine: you’re standing in the mixed zone, moments away from diving into an interview with the star of the day, who’s smashed all their performance predictions into smithereens and has set a record for, say, the best-ever eventing dressage score of all time, weeks after, like, rescuing a whole family from a burning building and being extradited from their country, or something similarly dramatic. You’re going to ask the question that yields the quote that ends up being the motto of the 2024 Olympics. You’re going to write that quote down with… a girthy pen with a pom-pom on top and an unapologetically sexual smirk imprinted upon its most bulbous bit. Oo-er.

A Christmas jumper that will make you regret all your life choices – £17

There are so few situations in which we can see this one working. Okay, yes, maybe Christmas of 2023, if your entire family is very into sports and also you’ve just bought them all tickets to the Olympics, so having a themed jumper is, momentarily, acceptable and fun.

Unfortunately, it’s enormously unlikely that by this December, anyone normal will have any sort of memory of what the Olympic mascot looked like. Which means that an hour into wearing this enemy of taste, you’ll have been asked what “that little chap on your jumper” is about forty times, and you will want to burn it. The Olympics merch people appear to agree with this, because it’s currently half price and a bargain, sort of, at £17.

This angry bird – £17

Oooh-la-la! C’est un coq gaulois! Le coq est en colère! Pourquoi le coq est-il si en colère? Pas grave! Allez les bleus and all that!

We love the idea of giving this stuffed, vengeful, slightly punk rock cockerel to, say, one of your nieces or nephews that you don't really like that much, so that every morning when they wake up, they have to reckon with its icy, formidable stare. What's the chicken thinking? What's the chicken's next move? Is he just really, really into France? (Yes, is the answer – his role as a heraldic animal of France dates back to the Middle Ages, mostly just because of a pun.)

Anyway, SPEAKING of le coq sportif, have you considered shelling out for…

A pair of French team budgie smugglers – £34

There’s a lot to take in here – the extraordinary £34 asking price (yes, that’s for one pair); the barely-there pouch for the, uh, baguette to go into; the cupping effect that these appear to have on the wearer’s buttocks. But most memorable of all is a detail that’s easy to overlook – a small mantra emblazoned upon them that reads ‘la victoire en face equipe de France’. That is, ‘Victory for France is in front of us’. Which is, all things considered, a wild sentiment to place right next to your junk.

And finally, perhaps our favourite souvenir of all...

Hatception 2024 – £21

This year’s Olympic mascot is called the Phryge (yes, really), and he’s styled and named after the Phrygian hats that have become such a symbol of the French republic and also of Joaquin Phoenix in that Napoleon film that went on for way too long. So it’s remarkable, really, that when the merch team decided to make the mascot (a hat) into a hat (double hat time), they decided that the smartest move wasn’t to retain the original hat’s general hatness, but to re-hat it into a new, deeply unflattering hat that’s less ‘let’s free this country from oppression’ and more ‘I have to wear this because I keep walking into the walls’. Anyway, buy one, it’s £21 and you’ll get at least one great Instagram story out of it.