When dusk falls over Paris on Friday, the city will reverberate to the spectacular and the divine. To mark the start of the Rugby World Cup, the Eiffel Tower will blaze with light. Then Oscar winner Jean Dujardin will direct an opening ceremony that celebrates French “savoir-faire and art de vivre”, as well as the sport’s 200th birthday. Inevitably, there will be fireworks. But the biggest bang of all will come when the two favourites for the tournament, France and New Zealand, lock muscle and bone in the opening game, and 80,000 people at the Stade de France roar their approval.
Organisers hope it will set the mood for a competition that stretches over 48 matches and 51 days – and is more than three weeks longer than the Fifa World Cup in Qatar. The initial signs are certainly positive. Teams have been welcomed to their training bases by huge crowds. Images of the French captain Antoine Dupont are everywhere. And 2.5m tickets have been sold, the highest ever, with 600,000 visitors arriving from abroad. Among them are the Prince and Princess of Wales, who will be in Bordeaux and Marseille to cheer on Wales and England this weekend.
Make no mistake, this is one of the biggest sporting events of 2023. Yet in the highest circles of the French government and sport, it is being viewed with bifocal lenses. For this tournament also sounds the starting gun for a year-long Saturnalia of sport in France that concludes with Paris hosting the Olympics and Paralympics.
As Thursday’s bullish headline in Le Parisien put it: “From the Rugby World Cup to the Paris Games, here we go for the sporting year of the century.” However its editorial was more circumspect, warning of a “crazy” 12 months in which “the programme promises to be rich, the emotions immense, and the organisation Dantesque”.
However Étienne Thobois, who was CEO of the 2007 Rugby World Cup in France and is now in charge of the Paris 2024 Olympics, is confident that both events will be enormous successes – and have a deep and lingering impact across French society.
“We were traditionally a country that was very attached to culture, and maybe less so with sport,” he tells the Guardian. “But now we love big events. One of the aims we have is to make sport a bigger part of society. We believe it is a fantastic tool for education, health and inclusion. And hosting sports events keeps the fire alive because these incredible athletes and their stories bring people and kids to sports. And that’s a fantastic thing.”
Speaking from the Paris 2024 offices in St Denis, Thobois says there have been shared discussions with Rugby World Cup organisers over potential issues but plays down suggestions the tournament will be a dry run for the Games. “We are quite close,” he says. “But the Rugby World Cup is a fantastic event in itself. However, there will definitely be things to learn – especially in flow management, security, and transport.
“It’s different, of course. But what happens during the Rugby World Cup will have an influence on what people project for next year’s Olympics so we’ll be watching carefully.”
And so will the rest of the world. The first major test will come during the opening game, when a beefed up security presence at the Stade de France is designed to stop a repeat of incidents at last year’s Champions League final, which included Liverpool fans being mugged and assaulted after the game. With the stadium also hosting the athletics at the Olympics, there is a sense that France’s match against New Zealand desperately needs to go off without a hitch.
Meanwhile other problems loom on the horizon. France’s largest air traffic controllers union, SNCTA, has called for a nationwide walkout on 15 September and 13 October, while workers on the Paris Metro have also threatened to strike during the tournament.
So far the biggest issue for the hosts has been the outrage at the selection of the Montpellier lock Bastien Chalureau, who was sentenced to six months in prison in 2020 for a racially motivated assault on two other players. Chalureau has admitted to the attack but denies it had a racist character and has appealed. Even France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, has got involved, insisting that: “Justice must be able to rule in its own time, with complete peace of mind. The presumption of innocence and the right to appeal exist.”
As for the tournament itself, there is a growing confidence in France that the hosts can surf a wave of emotion and win their first Rugby World Cup, despite injuries to some key players, including the fly-half Romain Ntamack.
But they have not been helped by a grotesquely lopsided draw that ensures that only two of the world’s top five ranked teams – Ireland, France, New Zealand, South Africa and Scotland – can reach the semi-finals.
For England, however, injustice creates opportunity. Despite a poor year, which has included a surprise defeat to Fiji, bookmakers still make them strong favourites to emerge from a group that includes Argentina, Samoa, Chile and Japan, and then reach the semi-finals.
However the game’s romantics will hope there is also more scope for the smaller nations, in particular Fiji and Samoa, to thrive and survive into the last eight.
No wonder World Rugby’s chairman, Sir Bill Beaumont, promises a tournament that will be “compelling, spectacular and unpredictable” and proclaims that “never has a nation been so ready and so excited to host”.
Over the coming weeks, as the dying embers of summer give way to more uncertain climes, those words will be put relentlessly to the test.
