Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.37458/nstf.27.1.3
The Cognitive Attack Against The Olympic Games In France
Eyal Pinko
; BESA Center, Bar Ilan University, Israel
Abstract
The opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games became the target of one of the most successful cognitive attacks of the decade. A festive scene celebrating French fashion, diversity, and the Dionysian tradition was deliberately reframed by an information attacker, as a blasphemous parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” Within hours, the false narrative went viral globally, provoked institutional responses, and caused sustained reputational damage to France, the Olympic movement, and Western liberal values. This paper demonstrates, through chronological reconstruction and narrative analysis, that the scandal exhibits all the hallmarks of a planned cognitive operation: rapid seeding, bot amplification, selective editing of official statements, and exploitation of existing cultural cleavages. The primary beneficiaries, Russia (banned from the Games), domestic far right movements, and conservative political forces in the United States, are clearly identifiable. The case constitutes a textbook example of contemporary cognitive warfare executed in the open-source information environment.
Keywords
Cognitive warfare; disinformation; character assassination; Paris 2024 Olympic Games; narrative seeding; Russia hybrid operations
Hrčak ID:
345447
URI
Publication date:
16.3.2026.
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