The Olympics have always been about more than just sport. Since 1896 they have been staged as a cosmopolitan festival that sends a message to humanity. In their 19th-century incarnation the games were, as Baron De Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympics, wrote, “a display of manly virtue” for what was, in effect, a neo-hellenic cult of the amateur athletic gentleman.

The International Olympic Committee (ioc), the games’ governing body, has long since made its peace with professionalism and women’s sport, but it has struggled to find new messages that it can credibly broadcast. Such messages are no mere sideshow; they are supposed to be central to the modern Olympics. For in the absence of such social purpose or moral mission, what are the games but a very expensive, highly commercialised made-for-television spectacle?

The Olympic movement’s embrace of human rights, for example, has been undercut over the past couple of decades by its continued dealings with autocratic hosts, and this summer by the perceived inconsistency of banning Russia for invading Ukraine but giving Israel a free pass on Gaza. The idea that the Olympics are a powerful instrument of urban development for host cities has proved illusory, as has the notion that elite sport in general and the Olympics in particular can help boost sporting participation and promote healthier lifestyles.

One unquestionable success has been the way in which the Olympics have demonstrated the profound impact of climate change. Tokyo 2020 was forced to move the marathon 800km north to Sapporo because Tokyo’s increasingly hot and humid summers made the event dangerous to participants. Uncommonly powerful storms forced the rescheduling of surfing and sailing events. The Winter Olympics are in even more climate trouble, as the bare mountains and strips of artificial snow at Beijing 2022 testified.

To its credit the ioc has been a leading advocate of climate action in the world of sport. The organisers of Paris 2024 have given the issue plenty of thought, too. They have been making contingency plans for what to do in the event that the city is struck by one of the increasingly frequent and vicious summer heat waves that Europe has been experiencing. And they are aiming for a carbon footprint half the size of those of London 2012 and Rio 2016.

Yet the Paris games will still produce more than 1.5m tonnes of carbon—somewhere between the annual emissions of Fiji and Malta—and the organisers, recognising that the carbon-offset model is broken, have abandoned the pretence that the games are net zero. In the absence of sustainable forms of aviation, it is hard to see how a global festival that attracts 10,500 athletes, tens of thousands coaches and administrators, more than 30,000 journalists and up to 2m foreign visitors can ever be so.

In this regard, the Olympics face the same problems as many other established institutions: that in their current form they are simply not compatible with a sustainable society and a habitable planet, and it is not clear how this can be addressed. It may then be that the most powerful message the Olympics can send is that we cannot continue with business as usual—and this would best be delivered by taking a pause.

It wouldn’t be the first time that the games had been cancelled. Berlin was due to host in 1916, but the first world war intervened. Tokyo was all set for 1940 until Japan invaded China, and the replacement host, Helsinki, was busy then and in 1944 fighting the Soviet Union. It is often argued that responding to the climate crisis will entail at least the level of collective action, directed investment and technological innovation that the second world war demanded. But these are proving elusive, and the warnings from climate activists, the UN secretary-general and others are not cutting through. An Olympic pause would send a strong signal about the urgency of this moment and the scale of change required.

In the interregnum the world could take the opportunity to enact some serious reforms, and as the ioc won’t be consumed with allocating and staging Olympiads, that’s the perfect place to start. The organisation—unelected, unaccountable, self-appointed and invariably self-serving—should be dissolved and its functions reconstituted as a set of separate but linked organisations.

Governance and participation in global civil society would be the responsibility of a new, more transparent World Sport Organisation. This would, at arm’s length, supervise a global anti-corruption agency for sport and an event-management company that would stage Olympic events and build commercial partnerships. A new Olympic Foundation would be tasked with supporting global grassroots sport and athletes’ welfare. Along the way we could reform the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which lacks meaningful independence from sport’s governing bodies; insist on gender equality in senior management positions; and give athletes and their representatives more of a voice.

The first task of the new Olympic agencies would be to initiate a conversation about what an alternative model might look like. Could the games be much smaller? Should they be held at one permanent site? Could a multi-city version work, with a mix of permanent and occasional hosts?

It wouldn’t be easy. nbc pays to broadcast running, jumping and swimming, not dialogues about governance or how to structure events. Visa and Coca-Cola would reassess the value of their sponsorship deals. And it would be very hard on the generation of athletes that is denied the opportunity to perform on the Olympic stage. However, without dramatic change of this sort, it is hard to see how the many future generations of athletes, both professionals and amateurs, the elite and the grassroots, will be able to perform at all.