This is part of Slate’s 2024 Olympics coverage. Read more here.
Welcome back to “Best Jobs at the Olympics,” a biennial Slate series in which I, Slate correspondent Justin Peters, attempt to determine which of the jobs at the Olympics are the best jobs at the Olympics. A few ground rules: Olympic athletes are excluded from consideration; the job does not have to be a paid one; and a job-holder does not have to be human, or even a living being, in order to be considered. During the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, I concluded that “bobsled decorator” was the best job at those Games. Will any of the jobs at the Paris Games live up to the sky-high standard set by the bobsled decorators of Beijing? Let’s find out!
Nominee: Parkour torch guy
Where to find him: Bopping around Paris during the opening ceremony
Job description: Bear the Olympic torch, somersault with the Olympic torch, try not to drop the Olympic torch
Why this might be the best job at the Olympics: You have a very important role. As the parkour torch guy, you are the acrobatic linchpin of the expansive, highly choreographed opening ceremony of the Paris Games. You will “steal” the torch from a bunch of children and then will parkour your way through the rivers, streets, and rooftops of Paris with it, all while concealing your identity behind a mask and a hood, just like countless parkour torch guys before you. You are the “main character” of the opening ceremony, and, as such, you are one of the few people on Earth who can honestly say that, for several hours, the eyes of the entire world were upon you. Your name will be known in Eswatini.
As the parkour torch guy, you will get a lot of exercise. Unlike the bobsled decorators of Beijing, who spent most of their time crouching in warehouses trying not to get paint on their fingers, your job is all cardio, all the time. No crouching in warehouses for you! If you encounter a warehouse in the course of your duties, you will instead somersault across its roof before nimbly leaping to the ground below. You will become so fit during the training process that you will choose to pause your membership to Equinox. Your job as parkour torch guy will end up saving you upward of $600.
Your job is very difficult, which makes it all the more impressive that you are able to complete it successfully. Not only are you required to hold the Olympic torch and run with it, but you will also be required to leap with it, and launch yourself through transom windows with it, and defy gravity by propelling yourself up walls with it. Your exploits will inspire such widespread awe that children worldwide will clamor to learn how to do what you do. You will make much more than $600 selling instructional videotapes about how to become a parkour torch guy.
You will get to see the best parts of Paris as the parkour torch guy. No standing in one spot for you! Your job will take you all around town, and you will soon become intimately familiar with the most famous sights in the City of Lights. Once the Games conclude, you will leverage your expertise by offering high-priced tours of Paris to wealthy tourists via Airbnb Experiences. You will end up with a lot of lucrative side hustles as the parkour torch guy.
The hood and mask you wear will inspire much “cocktail chatter” about your true identity, and the ensuing buzz will lift you to the loftiest heights of celebrity. The “smart money” will maintain that you are probably David Belle, originator of parkour and star of parkour-centric action movie District B13. A small but vocal splinter group will insist that you are actually Albert Belle, noted 1990s baseball grump. Two or three record store clerks will claim that you are Stuart Murdoch, frontman of Belle and Sebastian, but it’ll turn out that they’re just trying to stimulate sales of some overstock copies of The Life Pursuit. As the parkour torch guy, you will inspire a whole new generation of music fans to fall in love with twee Scottish indie-pop.
Why this might not be the best job at the Olympics: Though you were simply following the script you were given by the director of the opening ceremony, you will come to feel sort of guilty about stealing the torch from those children. You will wonder whether or not they were “in on the joke,” and in the back of your mind you will worry that you may have traumatized them for life. You will contemplate seeking them out to apologize, and to explain yourself, but you will eventually decide against it, for fear that it might make matters worse. You will wonder whether you technically qualify as a “deadbeat dad.”
There is such thing as too much cardio, and as parkour torch guy, you may well burn yourself out before your time. You will pull several muscles launching yourself up those walls, and your efforts to “play through the pain” will likely end in disaster. If you are indeed David Belle, then the fact that you are currently 51 years old will put you at even greater risk of dangerous overexertion. You will probably slip and fall off one of those walls mid-climb someday, and that will be it for you, the parkour torch guy. They will recite stanzas from an A.E. Housman poem at your funeral.
When you somersault across the roof of that warehouse, you will scare the shit out of the bobsled decorators working diligently inside. The noise you make will cause them to inadvertently spill their paint buckets all over the bobsleds they are decorating in advance of the Milano Cortina Games in 2026. The ensuing mess will end up getting them chewed out by their bobsled managers, and some of them will quit on the spot and give up on painting entirely. As parkour torch guy, you will end up destroying a lot of artists’ dreams.
Although you’ve spent your whole life thinking of yourself as an outsider, your sudden fame will make you worried that you really are what some of your old parkour friends have accused you of being, what you’ve always loathed: a sellout. Before too long you’ll find yourself having intense work lunches with Emmanuel Macron, and negotiating with Louis Vuitton about starring in their next ad. You will soon find it easier and more dignified to just use the door rather than vault through the transom window above it.
Given all of your parkour-torch-guy side hustles, you will run the risk of taxing the patience and pocketbooks of your fans across the world. “Another side hustle from the parkour torch guy?” they will say. “What’s he selling now? Parkour Torch Guy Steaks? Parkour Torch Guy Onesies?” Your athletic exploits will eventually be forgotten, and the world will soon come to know you only as a money-hungry shill. You will lose a ton of money on those onesies and will no longer be able to afford your Equinox membership.
The rumors that you are actually Albert Belle will inevitably grow louder and louder. You will be jeered at public appearances about your corked-bat shenanigans, and about that time you chased a trick-or-treater with your car. Your protestations that you’re not Albert Belle will be met with scorn, and derisive cries of “Joey!” Eventually you will come to doubt your own story, and will lean into the “retired baseball misanthrope” persona big-time. You will start an alt-right podcast alleging that Cleveland’s baseball team is too “woke” because they changed their name to the Guardians. Like all parkour torch guys before you, you will start off as the hero before inevitably becoming the villain.
How this could be a better job at the Olympics: The parkour torch guy could also have a flamethrower.
Verdict: To refresh your memory, we score our Best Jobs at the Olympics candidates on a 10-point scale across four different categories: the amount of exposure a job gets, how enjoyable the job seems, the job’s enviability quotient, and whether the worker gets to wear a funny hat. I’ll give parkour torch guy 2 out of 3 for exposure, because although the eyes of the world are upon them, nobody knows who they actually are; 1.5 out of 3 for enjoyability, because parkour is fun to watch but exhausting to actually perform; 1.5 out of 3 for enviability, because it’d be better if people mistook the parkour torch guy for universally beloved former Cleveland slugger Jim Thome. And 0.5 out of 1 in the funny hat category, because while a hood does indeed cover your head, technically it is not a hat. So 5.5 out of 10 for the parkour torch guy. This is currently the best job at the Olympics.
Source: Is the Parkour Torch Guy Blessed With His Role—or Is He Cursed?
