PARIS — The French invented the modern Olympic Games and the French invented the word “mascot” so how come, people have been asking here, the mascot of France’s first Summer Olympics in a hundred years looks so much like a certain erogenous zone of the female anatomy?

“We thought about that from the start,” says the man who led the design team for the mascots – and the whole pinkish-and-purplish Art Deco template of these Games — and who ran the prototype past his six-year-old daughter in Paris, but not his 102-year-old grandmother in Toronto.