Paris has done its job. We’re all bleary-eyed from early morning gold but in a better mood, helped in Brisbane by a sunny start to the Ekka where the smiles (even in the rain) match the hopes we should now have for our own Games.

The Paris Olympics (with the Paralympics still to come) have been a showpiece – not just for Australia but the world that has put its angst on hold for 10 days to turn its attention to sports rarely recognised and, in some cases, pretty well unheard of.

Only the French with their brazen hijacking of style would turn the stadium running tracks purple and be willing to rearrange their rousing national anthem for a closing ceremony that started with tipping the beret to Games past and ended with raising a cap to Games future.

Any fears that French chaos would reign are past, the concern that the Seine would not be fit for a swim leg of the triathlon past too. We’re left with a reminder that Paris truly is one of the great cities of the world.

Should this nag at our own aspirations for the 2032 Games in Brisbane? It should. Because between now and then, we will have the LA Games where Hollywood will put on the full spectacle. And then it’s over to us.

But there’s nothing like a bit of pressure to get results. I say Brisbane should be motivated, not intimidated, by what we have seen in Paris and the almost certain guarantee of what we will see in LA.

But we need to get cracking.

It’s now just accepted fact that no real decisions on the location of the major Olympic venues will be made until next year. That means we have wasted a lot, but not all, the advantage gained from being an early selection as the 2032 host.

There are two major construction decisions to be made – one is the location of an athletics stadium that will cut it on global TV screens; the other is the location of an aquatic centre.

Spinning off that are transport decisions. Whatever we settle on should give bang to the buck by aligning with existing transport networks or be the catalyst to upgrade transport to growth zones in south-east Queensland.

Then there is the capacity to upgrade existing locations for other sports to create a permanent network of first-rate venues of varying size in the city. This would truly be a legacy – and I declare an interest here: I am a councillor of the Royal National Association which has one such venue, the Ekka grounds.

We can lament all we like that this is entrapped by politics. But it is the role of politics to resolve these tensions and they WILL be resolved one way or another, hopefully with enough private sector support to take the pressure off government funding needed for energy renewal, housing and hospitals.

For there is no appetite for Brisbane to come into 2028 (just one political cycle away) without a clear runway to be a first-rate host for the world’s best athletes in 2032.

Venues are central to this but, as the French showed and the Americans will show even more, so is the smoke and mirrors. How the city looks, how the Games display to the world what is special about it and what is special about its people will be just as important as where we place our stadia.

I have written before about the risk of Games carpetbaggers taking over our planning and not seeing the value in what we have been able to achieve as a city over the past four decades. How we relate to the river is central to this and must be central to how we think about presenting ourselves to the world.

But we also need to turn to ourselves and ask what else makes us special. Increasingly, it’s our cultural diversity (close to one-third of Queenslanders were born in another country), it’s our laconic approach to life and it’s our continued connection as urban people with the country life that dominates most of our state’s land area.

Sure, we don’t have the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe or Tom Cruise. But we do have Chris Hemsworth, Bluey and the Barrier Reef and cultural attributes already admired by the rest of the world. We need to own them and amplify them. That would truly be gold.