The 2024 Paris Olympic Mascot Is A Hat With A Face... For Some Reason

In two years, the Summer Olympics are going to be held in Paris. With two years before the Games get underway, it's time to say bonjour to the Olympic mascot, La Phryge Olympique.

It's a hat... with a face.

It may look like someone watched the creepy 1970s TV show Lidsville and thought "There it is! There's our mascot!" but apparently there's a significance.

A Phrygian cap is a red hat freed slaves wore in the ancient Greek kingdom of Phrygia. Centuries later, the hats became symbols of freedom during the American and French Revolutions according to The New York Times.

Typically, Olympic committees trot out a lazy mascot, usually an animal that comes from their country.

Don't believe me? Here's all of them.

With only a few exceptions — namely, whatever the hell Atlanta, Athens, Beijing, and Tokyo were doing — they stick to that tried-and-true formula.

So, at least the folks in Paris went a little unique. But having a mascot that's a hat seems like a weird thing to choose when it comes to marketing. You can bet they're going to sell hat shirts, hat socks, hat plushes, and maybe they'll try and tear a hole in the matrix with some hat hats.

Ask the New Jersey Devils and their Jersey jersey how distracting this makes people.

La Phryge Olympique was accompanied by another mascot for the 2024 Paralympics. That one is called la Phryge Paralympique and it's a hat with a prosthetic leg.

Once again, it doesn't seem like they wanted to spend too much time on this.

That was definitely a work smarter, not harder situation.

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