There are still a few hours to go before the Olympic Games begin, but the French capital has already sealed itself off. Since last Thursday, the centre of Paris has been synonymous with piles of fences, barriers preventing people from walking freely and soldiers walking in groups, alert to any suspicious movement. The starting gun for the Olympic Games will soon be fired, with a ceremony that for the first time in history will take place outside a stadium. The security challenge is immense. In addition to being on maximum alert for an attack, France is hosting the largest sporting event on the planet in a tense international context, marked by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
The city is still far from the festive atmosphere that accompanies major sporting events. The proximity of the event has been felt for a week now, with residents showing QR codes to get from one side to the other and tourists turning back when they are unable to get through the cordoned-off areas. To ensure the safety of the event, 30,000 police and security forces patrol the streets of Paris and its surrounding areas every day. On some days there will be 45,000. More than 20,000 private company agents and nearly 10,000 soldiers have also joined in.
The aim is to avoid any risk, any misstep during an event that will attract more than 15 million visitors. “It is the greatest security challenge of modern times,” Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin told the international press on Tuesday. The atmosphere is tense. Two knife attacks have occurred in the city in recent days, although unrelated to the Games. The authorities have also arrested a young neo-Nazi who was planning a violent action during the Olympic torch relay and a Russian on suspicion of planning acts of “destabilisation”. The minister stressed that one million people involved in the event, either close or far, had been investigated and that 4,355 had been ruled out as posing some kind of threat: risk of foreign interference, Islamist radicalism, membership of far-right or far-left groups. Among those investigated were the inhabitants of the buildings along the Seine, where the opening ceremony will take place.
The Olympics are a perfect target. Threats are multiple and come from both inside and outside. In recent days, police patrols from countries such as Spain, Qatar and Brazil have been seen lending a hand to French forces and guarding squares, parks and metro stations. But even so, 68% of French people remain concerned about security during the event, according to a recent survey by the Odoxa institute. Darmanin, however, has ruled out any specific threats against the event.
“Islamist attacks remain the most important threat,” said Paris police chief Laurent Nunez during an interview with several newspapers from the European media alliance LENA, including Morning Express, on July 16. The senior official does not believe that there could be large-scale attacks organized in foreign countries like those suffered by France and Belgium between 2015 and 2016, and rather points to endogenous threats. “It could always happen that an isolated individual takes a knife and starts killing people. Or that an individual commits an action alone, but manipulated from abroad, given that the Islamic State has reorganized in Syria and Iraq,” he explained. Faced with this risk, the prefect assures that anyone who accesses the competition sites and the opening ceremony will be searched before entering.
The French cybersecurity agency, for its part, has prepared for cyberattacks. The question is not whether there will be, but how many. “We will not be able to prevent all cyberattacks,” its director general, Vincent Strubel, admitted to the daily. LiberationThe goal, he clarified, is to avoid most of them and, above all, to control their effects.
These days, people with badges and walkie-talkies. Three security zones surround the Seine, with 14 km of fencing. “The most difficult thing was finding a balance between security and people’s daily lives,” Nunez confessed. In normal times, tourists from all over the world stroll along the quays of the iconic river and flock to the cafés in search of a short break. But the terraces and shops now look empty, some wedged between fences like the usually crowded one brasserie The Nouvel Institut, located a few metres from the river in the 5th district of the capital, is a café with a capacity of 50 people. “There is no one there, just a few employees of the Games,” complains Jad Meroue, one of the 20-something managers of the café, which has gone from having 50 seats at lunchtime to just 20.
A few metres away, Maxime Morin, the manager of the La Fac bar, makes a similar observation. “The police deployment is creating a psychosis rather than calming things down,” says the 39-year-old Parisian. “Traveling is hell. I have a friend who spent three hours and 45 minutes walking seven kilometres,” he says. A little further away, on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, Annick Gobert, a handsome 75-year-old lady, plays down the inconvenience: “I think it’s normal, they warned us in advance and we also know that it won’t last, that it’s only for the ceremony.”
The first challenge will be to ensure the smooth running of the opening event on the Seine, which will be attended by 120 heads of state, including Israeli President Isaac Herzog. During the event, more than 6,000 athletes will parade on 90 boats over a 6-kilometre course. It is not known whether Israeli athletes will take part. The delegation, the Interior Minister said, will be protected 24 hours a day by an elite unit of the gendarmerie, due to the tensions caused by the war against the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas in Gaza.
In addition to the 35 police boats that will escort the athletes and the pre-demining work, there will be snipers deployed in the buildings and 80 teams specialised in anti-drone systems. The airspace will be completely closed within a radius of 150 km. The security device also includes explosive-detecting dogs and cameras equipped with artificial intelligence to avoid too dense groupings. The challenge is colossal and has raised concerns from the start.
In the book The cached face of the JO [La cara oculta de los JO, en español]Sébastien Chesbeuf, a former member of the Olympic Organising Committee, and journalists Thierry Vildary and Jean-François Laville, recount how the Board of Directors of the Olympic Games made the decision in 2021 to organise the ceremony on the Seine without taking into account the issue of security. The then prefect and Nunez’s predecessor, Didier Lallement, warned the authorities of the “unreasonable” nature of the project, which had initially planned to accommodate two million spectators and allow some Parisians to freely attend the parade.
Reality and the international context eventually prevailed. The number of spectators rose from two million to the current 320,000. The event was also no longer free for part of the public. Alain Bauer, a professor of criminology at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, described the decision to hold the ceremony on the river as “criminal folly” in May, pointing in particular to the risk of a drone attack or the consequences of a stampede, which could throw hundreds of people into the water. However, Nunez, the prefect of Paris, assures that a plan B will only be used “in the event of a terrorist attack or if there is a proven imminent threat”. “This is absolutely not the case today. We will prove that [a Bauer] “that he was wrong,” he said.
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