A French sprinter said she will be prohibited from participating in the Paris Olympics’ opening ceremonies Friday night because she wears a hijab.

Sounkamba Sylla, 26, expressed her frustration on her social media last weekend.

“You are selected for the Olympics, organized in your country, but you can’t participate in the opening ceremony because you wear a headscarf,” she wrote on Instagram, according to The Associated Press.

Sylla is a member of France’s 400-meter women’s and mixed team relays. However, France enforces secular laws, and French Olympic Committee President David Lappartient said French Olympians are ordered to follow secular principles that apply to public sector workers, which includes a ban on hijabs.

“It’s perhaps sometimes not understandable in other countries in the world, but it’s part of our DNA here in France,” Lappartient said.

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Sounkamba Sylla of France hands the baton to teammate Alexe Deau in the 4x400m relay at the 26th European Athletics Championships Rome 2024 at Stadio Olimpico June 11, 2024, in Rome, Italy. (Pier Marco Tacca/Getty Images)

He added that talks were underway to come to a solution to allow Sylla to participate in the ceremonies in a way her “beliefs are respected.”

“I have no doubt that a solution can be found,” he said. “We hope that everyone can take part in the opening ceremony.”

Sylla routinely wears a hijab while competing.

France’s Sounkamba Sylla, Camille Séri, Louise Maraval and Amandine Brossier pose for a photo after the women’s 4x400m relay heats during the World Athletics Championships at the National Athletics Centre in Budapest Aug. 26, 2023. (Jewel Samad/AFP via Getty Images)

She ran with a black headscarf in several events, including the 2022 and 2023 world championships and the World Relays in May 2024.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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How do you say “locavore” en francais?

When Olympic athletes and members of the press sit down to dine on the bounty of France next month, some of what’s on their plates will have been grown and gardened and harvested — from underground garages to road medians to rooftops — in Paris.

Not every course of every meal, not by a long shot. Perhaps a microgreens or endive salad, with shitake mushrooms? Serving up 13 million Olympics meals and snacks, all exclusively Parisian-made, is beyond the reach of even this city’s cuisine miracle workers. And this bit of food bandwidth won’t be getting athlete-style scores or Michelin stars, but it will be enough to show the yield and reach of Paris’ ambitious “Capital Agricole” projects.

Edible Paris is one section you’ll find on the city’s long, ambitious enviro menu — a larger regreening of the City of Light into the City of Lighter Environmental Impact. Paris has begun banishing cars and car pollution from the city’s heart, plans to add almost 250 acres of green space and another 75 acres dedicated to urban agriculture — beehives, hops, fruit trees, vegetables, cultivated largely on public property.

When I was in Paris a while back, I made my way into the august French Renaissance-style city hall, the Hotel de Ville, and up to the office of Audrey Pulvar, the deputy mayor in charge of sustainable food and agriculture and the systems to make them possible.

I knew I’d come to the right place when I looked out the window beyond her desk and saw — a window box. Those weren’t flowers she was growing there; they were beets and tomatoes.

The ParisCulteurs project envisions a cultivated world city that cultivates more than flowers and fashion. Like any modern city, Paris’ early inhabitants raised their own food; the Romans, who called the place Lutetia, coaxed grapes and figs from the Gallic soil.

At Versailles, some 20 miles outside Paris, Queen Marie Antoinette had the Hameau, her little model farm with its working dairy. On the walls of the Paris suburb of Montreuil there once grew peaches of legendary richness, and a very few are still cultivated with the tenderness afforded to babies.

Yet for centuries, the best of France’s goods and goodies have floated upriver or flowed downhill for the care and feeding of Paris.

Pulvar’s projects are like the tines of a fork, several in number but working toward the same aims of nutrition and environmental responsibility. Paris already serves 30 million “collective catering” meals a year, she told me — to students, kids in daycare, city workers, the elderly and needy.

The AgriParis program that will be feeding athletes and journalists throughout the Games intends eventually to make all of that food organic and sustainable, and half of it produced within about 150 carbon-considerate miles of Paris. That sounds like a vast territory, but now it’s almost three times that.

Another tine on the French fork is the urban agriculture project to educate Parisian schoolchildren and their families about food — where it comes from and what it takes to bring it to their plates. (This reminded me of the time 10 years ago when I hung out with Jamie Oliver as he was trying to get the LAUSD on board with his good-food program. He found that some high schoolers could not identify basic food origins — honey comes from bears? Guacamole from green apples?)

The city of Paris owns a lot of land and a lot of buildings, and Pulvar’s projects welcome green-minded small businesses wanting to rent those spaces and grow and market their goods in civic spaces like roadway medians, abandoned parking lots and the rooftops of city-owned buildings and apartment complexes.

Paris still has empty acreage like the “petite ceinture,” or small belt, an abandoned 19th century railroad track that encircles Paris, and it’s being transformed into agricultural gardens. On old walls of a Paris that grew beyond them, beer brewers rent the vertical stretches for growing hops. A school rooftop is being dedicated for an aromatic garden of herbs, berries, vegetables and a solar dryer for teas. And an urban farm created atop the city’s Charonne reservoir grows and sells microgreens to locals, and teaches the green-minded how to grow them, too.

The Railway Farm, also on the small belt, is a community project that, with the blessings of the city, developed an award-winning enclave of homeless and student housing, agriculture and composting workshops, and crops of herbs, berries and vegetables — and the restaurant to serve them.

Parisians’ default verb may sometimes seem to be “grogner,” to grumble, but Pulvar thinks most ordinary Parisians are fine with the projects, especially the nonprofit initiatives.

“After COVID,” she told me, “many people realized they wanted their lives to be different. Often, they are people in business school who now have business degrees and who wanted to change their lives. A lot of women [do], especially, and it’s oftentimes led by neighborhood initiatives, groups who conceive of a project and decide to work on improving the lives of the people in their neighborhoods.”

At first, French farmers were skeptical, though. “They felt like they were being told they were not needed in the countryside anymore. That was not the case at all,” Pulvar said. “Everyone knows that we cannot feed Paris with city agriculture [alone]. We will always need the farmers outside of Paris.”

Now, what can L.A. — host of the next Summer Olympics in 2028 — possibly do to compete?

Confession: We can’t compete, not in the urban agriculture category. If our past performance as host of the 1984 Olympics is how we’d qualify, I don’t think we’d even make the team.

Not too much was made of what athletes were eating in 1984. The L.A. Olympic Organizing Committee put forth a “food vision” manifesto, promising a Southern California bounty of “fruit and vegetables in a variety and quantity like very few places in the world.”

There were a few stories about restaurants hoping for a tourist customer surge, and an Olympic Restaurant Ethics Committee was formed by a few restaurants to pledge good service and no price gouging.

The Times surveyed renowned chefs and found that beyond some red-white-and-blue-frosted desserts, and foodstuff arranged to suggest the Olympic rings — fruit, antipasti, onion rings — most weren’t bothering. Ken Frank, of the then-new-ish La Toque, said, “Just because I’m serving a five-course menu during the Olympics doesn’t mean I will call it a ‘pentathlon.’” (Since then, Frank’s restaurants have earned him a restaurateur’s gold medals: more than a dozen Michelin stars.)

Los Angeles Magazine’s deep dive into Olympic food turned up this: Despite the usual calorific dishes and never-expiring canned fruit cocktail, in 1984, some of the cuisine available round the clock to athletes at the nine Olympic Village cafeterias also stretched to “regional favorites: cheese enchiladas, gazpacho, and avocado soup” and dishes “still unfamiliar to most Americans in 1984: ceviche, tabbouleh, oriental vegetables and water chestnuts.” Also, radically, there were doggie bags.

A clipping from The Times in August 1984 highlights the popularity and difficulty of an Olympics promotion put on by McDonald’s.

(Los Angeles Times archive / newspapers.com)

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The best Olympics food story had nothing to do with what the athletes ate. McDonald’s promoted a game-card giveaway to customers, and for every card that matched up to an American athlete winning a medal, something on its menu — Cokes, fries, burgers — would be free.

McDonald’s hadn’t counted on the no-show-Commie effect of the Soviet boycott of the Games, so more Americans won medals in the Russians’ absence. A few franchises ran out of Big Mac buns. A McD’s regional VP told The Times back then that it was “the most successful” company games promotion, “but it’s also the most costly.”

And in 1932, when L.A. first landed the Summer Olympics, the L.A. Times’ “home services bureau” director offered some spirit-of-the-Games recipes: chicken curry for India — pretty daring then, no doubt -—and a “flag of all nations” ham, which turned out to be a pretty standard ham that was just ornamented with darling little flags from all the competing countries.

What makes this ham recipe “Olympian” — from an August 1932 edition of the Los Angeles Times about Olympic-themed food — seems to be mostly the flags.

(Los Angeles Times archive / newspapers.com)

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We’ve long had a reputation as a cradle of health food culture. In the movie “Annie Hall,” Woody Allen aims his anti-L.A.-disdain at The Source, the pioneering health food restaurant on the Sunset Strip, by ordering “alfalfa sprouts and mashed yeast.” (The Source was operated by a kind of a culty guy who called himself Father Yod, but culty L.A. and culinary L.A. are ordinarily two different stories.)

Therefore, what we can’t match from Paris 2024, L.A. 2028 can contrast.

For every ounce of biotic-organic-supercleansing foodstuffs sold at Erewhon, we sell probably 10 pounds of the world’s most famous fast food. Most of the founding burger and taco empires were started up within maybe a hundred miles of L.A. City Hall. That’s what we should be peddling to the world’s greatest athletes: Welcome to L.A., and to all the basic food groups — salt, fat, sugar and guilty pleasure.

Go on! Have a burger! Have a doughnut! Taco trucks! Gas station sushi! Pho and poke bowls! Kosher burritos! Fatburgers and In-N-Out! Tommy’s hamburgers and Pink’s hot dogs! Fusion city, fusion food!

Welcome to L.A.! Enjoy the fast food (and the 1984 Olympics opening ceremony at the Coliseum)!

(Ken Hively / Los Angeles Times)

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Perhaps only the Earl of Sandwich has done more for great fast food than Los Angeles.

We could give the athletes apps and maps to find some faves.

I envision social media accounts crammed with athletes’ selfies in front of Randy’s Doughnuts in Inglewood, an example of mimetic architecture — where the buildings look like the things they sell. (The Brown Derby was not mimetic because it didn’t sell derbies, but The Tamale in long-ago Montebello did sell tamales.)

And the ultimate pilgrimage: to the ground of the vanished Hinky Dink BBQ stand, the spot on old Route 66 at the border between Pasadena and Eagle Rock. About a hundred years ago, as the origin story goes, one of the boys in the Sternberger family may have scorched a burger and covered up the burn with a slab of cheese. Ladies and gentlemen, messieurs et mesdames, le cheeseburger.

Oh, and “locavore” in French? It’s “locavore.”

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Arsenal’s new away kit is designed by an immigrant.

Foday Dumbuya, the founder and creative director of London-based menswear brand Labrum, wants you to know that.

Forget the demeaning connotations foisted upon people who have put down fresh roots in a country they weren’t born in by those who seek to divide — Dumbuya’s heritage is a point of pride, so much so that Labrum has used “designed by an immigrant” as a slogan on numerous products.

In collaboration with Arsenal’s usual kit supplier Adidas, Labrum has dressed manager Mikel Arteta’s side for away games next season, creating a kit that pays homage, directly, deliberately and unashamedly, to the club’s players and fans shaped by the African diaspora.

Predominantly black with red and green details to mimic the Pan-African flag, Arsenal’s away kit also boasts panels with a black-and-white zigzag design, intended to represent the flow of people who emigrated from African nations in the 1920s and the art that came with them.

This is not a football kit that only Black people can wear but it is designed to tell a story, and this project, which shines a light on Arsenal’s connection to Black culture, wouldn’t have been the same if it involved another Premier League club.

Fashion brands collaborating with recognised manufacturers to make kits is nothing new.

Juventus’ fourth strip in 2019-20 was co-produced by Palace, Daily Paper lent its style to Ajax’s 2022-23 third shirt, the Jamaica national team’s kits in 2023 were made in collaboration with Wales Bonner and last season, AC Milan released two strips designed in partnership with LA-based label Pleasures.

So what makes Labrum’s association with Arsenal stand out? For starters, this is the strip Bukayo Saka, Martin Odegaard and company will likely wear at Old Trafford and Anfield in 2024-25.

This is no throwaway side collection to be quietly buried among a season’s worth of releases. As Arsenal’s primary away kit, it will be seen — and is designed to start a conversation about the club’s Black influences.

“With Arsenal, they have a huge African fanbase,” says Dumbuya, who was born in Sierra Leone and moved to London aged 12. “From when (Nwankwo) Kanu, (Emmanuel) Eboue, Kolo Toure and all those guys used to play for Arsenal; I think African fans gravitate to that because they can see themselves in those players.

“The next thing will be, ‘How we follow through with this?’. Can we connect conversations and can we influence a community of people to understand Africa as a whole, understand being Black in London, Pan-Africanism, and also the work that Arsenal has been doing for a while now?

Arsenal’s new away kit (Daniel Barnes/The Athletic)

“Sometimes, you educate yourself by seeing something and you don’t have a clue about what it means, but now you’re prompted to go and investigate it. People talk about Pan-Africanism. Now it’s in your face.”

Labrum’s name is a Latin term that loosely translates as ‘having an edge’.

Its clothes are inspired by west Africa and in 2023, Labrum won The Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design, which Dumbuya received from King Charles.

Last year, ex-Arsenal and England striker Ian Wright walked the runway for Labrum at London Fashion Week. Chelsea’s Trevoh Chalobah has modelled for the brand. It has also designed clothes for Saka, Arsenal team-mate Reiss Nelson and former England international Rio Ferdinand.

When Netflix sponsored Hackney Wick FC — of Eastern Counties First Division South, tier nine of the English football pyramid — Dumbuya designed their kits. Labrum also outfitted the Sierra Leone team at the Tokyo Olympics three years ago and, in partnership with Adidas, will do so again at this summer’s Games in Paris.

Ian Wright and England rugby union star Maro Itoje have modelled for Labrum at London Fashion Week (Getty Images)

Yet designing an African-inspired Arsenal kit feels like a landmark moment for Dumbuya, who founded Labrum in 2014 and expects to see his designs worn in a game for the first time when Arteta’s side face fellow Premier League club Bournemouth in a friendly in Los Angeles on Wednesday (the early hours of Thursday UK time) to begin a three-match U.S. pre-season tour.

“I don’t know if another club would have done this, how it would transcend to those African fans, because they might not have a huge African fanbase,” says Dumbuya.

“Talking to Arsenal and Adidas, they’ve both always pioneered Black culture, Black history — from hip hop to other cultural stuff — that’s why we thought it’s a relationship and collaboration that was bound to happen.

“They chose wisely to find a brand; not just because we’re big and noisy, but more how authentic we are and that we tell stories about where we’re from, about London, and about west Africa. When things feel natural, people gravitate to it.”

How does one define the particular nuances of Arsenal’s connection to Black culture?

Lots of clubs have Black fans, of course, but Arsenal’s unique relationship is distinct, the outcome of a swathe of geological, societal and cultural factors, including the different Black heroes numerous generations of fans have seen play at the club’s former home Highbury or the Emirates Stadium.

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“I’m not an Arsenal fan per se, but I’m certainly one in the sense that I’m a Londoner and to be involved in Black identity and Black people, you have some affiliation with Arsenal at some level, be it in the playground, in the cultural spaces like the churches and the barber shop,” says Clive Chijioke Nwonka, associate professor of film, culture and society at University College London and co-editor of Black Arsenal, an upcoming book that explores the club’s place in Black British culture.

Arsenal’s players departed for their U.S. tour earlier this week wearing items from the Adidas-Labrum collection (Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)

“This is a shirt that attempts to celebrate what has been largely recognised, which is a movement towards Arsenal by people of the Black diaspora over a number of years — not just recently — and it’s only natural that brands and manufacturers move to that kind of space, and make it something that can be tangible and can be packaged for mass consumption.

“I think when we are talking about and describing Black culture, and Black culture production, we must also just be cognisant that what is really important is Black people and Black people’s experiences of that, which often sometimes is lost when we begin talking about brand culture.

“That being said, I am relieved that the final design was done using a Black designer, because that hasn’t always been the case.”

Authenticity matters and Arsenal, Adidas and Labrum all have a responsibility to ensure their partnership resonates.

That can be particularly difficult when a nod to culture is communicated through a piece of sportswear, a tangible item that people will purchase and wear.

The African diaspora is defined as the movement of people outside the continent and, subsequently, the people living around the world who can trace their roots back to Africa, whether that movement happened willingly or by force.

Expect to see this Arsenal away shirt. A lot. It’s bound to be popular and in 2024, football kits have evolved into desirable fashion items.

Labrum founder creative director Foday Dumbuya (Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images)

It will also carry a particular weight and provide a knowing nod to Black culture, no matter who wears it and where they come from.

“I think this is something that we would struggle to conceive of and even accept if another club had done something similar but that’s also why it needs a particular form of ethics around it, and curation and description, because it can’t just be ‘business as usual — here is another brand product’,” says Nwonka.

“I welcome the shirt and I celebrate the shirt because I know that is something that’s only possible through the optics and lens of Arsenal, and no one else.

“I think the best way that I can describe this in a broad way is that the Black Africa shirt attempts to capture and materialise what is already in existence or has already been expressed. They’re not creating Black Africa. The Arsenal connection already exists. Here is something that is now able to be distributed and shared.

“Of course, there’s an economic dimension there — but that’s neither here nor there, because everything we do in terms of being fans is a transaction in many ways — but it’s capturing and packaging and kind of materialising what is already present, already expressed, already felt by people.”

“I want people always to remember the first club that actually celebrated their fanbase outside of their territory and also included everything about that particular territory, which is Africa as a whole,” says Labrum creator Dumbuya, who is an Arsenal fan.

“It hasn’t been done before. The players that came from abroad have actually changed this league and have added so much depth and culture, so when people sort of remember the kit, I’m hoping that’s what they remember — that it was a celebration of those past players and the Arsenal African fanbase.”

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(Top photos: Adidas/Labrum)