Listen here on your chosen podcast platform.
It is one of the curiosities of Paris that a city among the planet’s most visited by tourists can feel quite so impenetrable to outsiders, full of codes to crack and faux pas’ to be swerved.
“You can’t walk into a restaurant demanding dinner at 6pm while wearing orange shorts and an Ohio State sweatshirt,” author Simon Kuper writes in his book Impossible City, a memoir of his, at times, painfully slow infiltration of Parisian life as resident across two decades. “There is a right way to do everything in Paris, and it was probably decided before you were born.”
Not then, at first glance, a host with natural inclination to throw arms open to the world. The Olympics, though, can do funny things to people and mood, as Londoners have spent the past dozen years attesting in tones of mournful reminisce, and Paris has been waiting a full century for the Games of 1900 and 1924 to make their hat-trick return.
That gap is not for want of trying: a long courtship punctuated by failed bids, and after the shock, stinging defeat to London in the race for 2012, appetite for another tilt was not widespread. Even now, on the eve of the Games, as some Parisians prepare to fall wilfully head over heels, others remain of the “never-liked-him-anyway” mind.
A headline in the global edition of native newspaper Le Monde on Wednesday rather summed up the mixed attitude — French people’s support for the Olympic Games remains unclear — though one radio station poll did hint at optimism, reporting that almost a quarter of Parisians now feel “satisfaction” when thinking about the Games, compared to just 11 per cent a couple of months ago. In a nation not famed for showing excitement, that is practically frothing.
The city’s most iconic locations have been made not merely the wallpaper to these Games, but part of its furniture
Does Paris feel ready to party? On arrival at Gare Du Nord, the volunteers smiled and waved, though not in quite as great number as one might expect, nor with quite the same gusto as the impromptu ovation given to Team GB athletes by staff and the public in the Eurostar departure hall at St Pancras.
Here in the French capital, the signs are all up, the giant rings hang in all the right places. But whatever excitement already exists, the scales can only truly be tilted away from scepticism and apathy by the spectacle itself.
Fortunately, the scale of organisers’ ambition here is epic.
The city’s most iconic locations have been made not merely the wallpaper to these Games, but part of its furniture. There is beach volleyball at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, equestrian events at the Palace of Versailles and urban sports, including new addition breaking, at the Place de la Concorde. Friday’s opening ceremony, meanwhile, will conclude in front of the Trocadero, after more than 10,000 athletes have cruised in flotilla up the River Seine, which is itself the venue for open water swimming and triathlon competitions, in front of more than 300,000 people.
Naturally, the French enjoying protest as the English do pints, none of this has been universally popular, and those who objected to the cost of cleaning up the Seine threatened a very dirty one indeed. As the ceremony has neared and 44,000 steel barriers been erected to make the heart of the Impossible City a little more so, frustration has grown among natives forced to show QR codes to gain access to their own neighbourhoods. Infringement on freedoms, with the Covid lockdowns a fresh memory, has not gone down well. The evil, though, is also broadly accepted as necessary in a city acutely aware of the potential consequences for leaving any stone unturned. The shadow of terror hangs over these Games, with the main athletics stadium, the Stade de France, targeted in the 2015 attacks and the threat level recently raised to its highest level in the wake of March’s Moscow concert hall shootings, which brought back grim memories of the same night’s carnage at the Bataclan.
“I think we’ll all breathe a sigh of relief when we get through the opening ceremony on Friday, and let’s pray that we all get through that in one piece,” said Andy Anson, CEO of the British Olympic Association, in an interview with The Sports Agents podcast this week.
Paris was still reeling when it was awarded the Games in 2017, but could not have predicted the level of global insecurity that would accompany their arrival, with Russia’s war on the continent’s fringes and the escalated conflict between Israel and Palestine a source of tension in a country that boasts both Europe’s largest Muslim and Jewish populations.
Domestic instability is also rife, in the aftermath of President Emmanuel Macron’s shock snap-election gamble. A late leftist coalition in this month’s second round of voting ensured these Games do not take place on the watch of the far-right, anti-Paris Rassemblement National, but the government remains in a state of flux, with Prime Minister Gabriel Attal at the helm still only as care -taker until the Games are done. There is, though, hope that, for now, they can prove a potent force as national unifier.
