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Not Olympics

Does a picture going viral on social media show Israeli swimmers making the phrase "Bring them home now" with their bodies during the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics? No, that's not true: The photo was taken in 2023 and posted to social media at that time. Also, it was taken at a pool in Israel, more than 2,600 miles from the site of the 2024 Olympic swimming events.

The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Facebook on July 27, 2024. It said:

The Israeli Olympic team was not allowed to wear their 'Bring Them Home' pins at the Olympic games in Paris. So they decided to spell it out for the entire world to see !

This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:

(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Mon Jul 29 13:30:00 2024 UTC)

The same image, however, was first posted on Instagram on November 19, 2023, (archived here) by photographer Adam Spiegel, (archived here) who specializes in aerial shots.

On the same day, the photo appeared (archived here) on Instagram on the account of the Israeli Swimming Association, the sport's national governing body (achieved here). As translated to English by Chrome, the caption read:

Israel's artistic swimming team took a photo at the weekend at the national pool at the Wingate Institute for a special photo for the return of the abductees to Israel. Ten female athletes participated in photographs taken from a drone and underwater.

The account of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Facebook also reposted (archived here) the image in November 2023.

The Wingate Institute (also known as the National Institute for Excellence in Sports, as translated by Chrome) is in Israel -- in the coastal area north of Tel Aviv (archived here).

The country that hosts the 2024 Summer Olympics between July 24 and August 11, 2024, is France, not Israel. Many of the venues are concentrated in the Paris area (archived here), with several exceptions in other French regions such as Nice (archived here).

A photo of the same scene taken in November 2023 from the underwater angle (archived here) was published by another photographer, Michel Braunstein (archived here). The tagged location was the Wingate Institute, too. In one of his 2023 blog entries (archived here), Braunstein confirmed that his photo showed the same event as what was covered from the aerial angle by Adam Spiegel.

A search across Google News for the keywords seen here (archived here) showed fact checks confirming that the photo predates the Games.

Spiegel, who is the author of the aerial image, confirmed to Lead Stories via email on July 30, 2024, that it was produced in November 2023 -- more than half a year before the Summer Games in Paris.

Other Lead Stories fact checks about the 2024 Olympics can be found here. Stories mentioning the Hamas-Israel war are here.