The list of controversies goes on and on, and yet they will take a back seat almost immediately the action begins in earnest from Saturday.
Paris will provide highlight reels and heartbreak, the consummation of three years' work often played out in just the briefest of moments, encapsulating the agony and ecstasy which makes the Olympics so compelling.
Such is the drama and breadth of sports, from teenagers and 50-year-olds rubbing shoulders in the same skateboard competition to NBA superstars and tennis gods with ailing bodies crying to be allowed into retirement, it makes the Games the ultimate sporting watch.
Adam Peaty is poised for a big Games
Zac Goodwin/PA Wire
Paris will be a swansong for so many, most notably Andy Murray and perhaps Rafael Nadal still just about playing, but well shorn of the peak of their powers.
But Paris 2024 will be the start of the competition journey for many others, too.
There will be those that are currently nobodies back in the UK right now, but in a few days' time household names, returning to rapturous applause and flitting from one chat-show sofa to the next.
Predicting the identities of who they might be is something of a guessing game; potentially the cyclist Emma Finucane, rowers Emily Craig and Imogen Grant, swimmer Matt Richards, or myriad others.
And there will be those familiar from Games past: Adam Peaty, Keely Hodgkinson, Helen Glover and Tom Daley. But whatever their experience, it has been the same story of toil for three years — in the case of Olympic debutants longer — to reach this point together.
UK Sport predict Team GB will come away with 50 to 70 medals, and the team have traditionally emerged on the higher end of those predictions. Gracenote has used its prediction model to estimates 63 British medals: 17 golds and fourth place in the medal table. For all the tens of millions pumped into each of the Olympic disciplines from National Lottery funding, it is still a mightily impressive feat, emulated at each Games since London 2012 from a population of 67million, of which 327 are competing in Paris.
Female athletes (172) outweigh the men (155) in the British set-up at the first-ever Games where there is gender parity.
Bach, now the bastion of gender equality as well as a purveyor of peace, talked of "female trailblazers coming to life". He said: "Like billions of people around the world, we are awaiting with impatience the youngest, most inclusive, most urban and most sustainable Games."
He will get a further chance to push his message as tonight's opening ceremony reaches its conclusion on a 3.7mile stretch of the Seine, amid reported performances from Lady Gaga and Celine Dion amid the flotilla of athletes, high-wire acrobats and laser show beamed onto the Eiffel Tower.
And, mercifully, then the talking can stop and the Games begin.
