The Seine flows serenely and Paris is intoxicated. Talent and power multiply, move and stir in its corners, always rich, but even more so. In the Pyramid of Bercy, Simone Biles and her sphinx-like body shake and contort, and fly and flutter, to the rhythm funkTaylor Swift and Beyoncé, who have joined forces to move her, the liberated woman, before doing so for Kamala Harris, a first cousin in the struggle; at the Gare du Nord, not far away, the Dream Team take a Eurostar to Lille, where the basketball is played, and only hope to win their matches quickly and have time to return to Paris from time to time to see Biles, “the best”, as LeBron James proclaims, fly; at Roland Garros, there is talk of Rafa Nadal, the sentimental tennis player, and of Novak Djokovic.
At one end, next to the Place de la République, where the anti-Games movement has called for a demonstration, On, a Swiss brand of trainers, summons the media and shows them a robot to which they stick a shoe last on one end and it turns and turns while a spray can sprays it with filaments of elastic and resilient polymers. In three minutes the shoe-making robot makes a 160-gram shoe, and in no time Moha Attaoui will put it on, a second skin, to win the 800m final. Meanwhile, at the La Défense swimming pool, Omega is showing off atomic clocks to measure the records of Popovici, Marchand and Ledecky to the thousandth, and along the river, with the avenues closed to noisy motorised traffic, happy Parisians and children are riding bicycles, policemen on horseback are passing by like in a Tati film, and they recite Apollinaire, “under the Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine, and our loves, I must remind you. Joy always came after sadness”. The less romantic, the more rustic, prefer Hemingway the poor journalist who made Paris a party without a hangover. Tourists prepare their QR codes like in the pandemic and dodge angry waiters with their hands crossed on empty terraces to cross the controlled zones with their noses glued to the Google Maps on their mobile phones.
Not far away, the Spanish monarchs are having their photos taken with athletes at the Embassy. Behind the fences, next to huge immovable concrete blocks, 35,000 gendarmes in bulletproof vests, hands on their chests and automatic rifles, keep watch.
The athletes, the gods of the stadium, have reserved the last week for themselves and neither Noah Lyles nor Mondo Duplantis nor Jordan Diaz nor Sydney McLaughlin nor Sha’Carri Richardson have yet arrived. Theirs will be the purple track that Mondo promises will be so fast that it will be difficult for records not to be broken with the miracle spikes of today.
The desire for festivities has defeated the slowness. The thirst for uncertainty will begin to grow and be satisfied already at the opening ceremony. Will a ship sink? Who will be the last torchbearer to carry the Olympic flame across dry land to light it in the cauldron installed in the Tuileries Garden, between Concorde and the Louvre Pyramid?
The Olympic Games have descended on the city, and have soaked everything, even the rebellious waters of the Seine, which are in “good spirits,” he stresses. Le Monde.The blessing of Saint Anne, might add Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who reminds us that D-Day, July 26, is also her name day, and that nothing bad can happen, of course, even though the decision to hold the opening ceremony in a river known for its dirty waters – 1.8 billion euros have been spent to clean them up – and treacherous currents, is a total challenge to fate and the storage capacity of the four large reservoirs that regulate its flow upstream, from the Marne.
No boat will sink, proclaims the mayor. None will touch the roof of any of the 18 bridges that will be crossed on the way from the Austerlitz station to Trocadéro. It is estimated that 8,500 athletes of the 10,500 present will parade, distributed among 204 national Olympic committees, who will be accommodated in 85 barges. Each country, with its flag and its standard-bearers, the sailor Támara Echegoyen and the canoeist Marcus Cooper, will be on board Spain. On the quays and bridges, there will be seating for 300,000 spectators and 12 large living tableaux with dancers and actors, which will retrace the history of this great country and the second city after London, which will host the Games for the third time, after Paris in 1900 and 1924. Starting at 7.30 pm, headed by Greece and the refugee team, each boat must cover the 6,000-metre journey in 42 minutes, with each vessel separated by no more than 150 metres. On the right will be the traffic regulators in 50 boats, and on the left, the same number will transport dozens of television cameras.
They will perform in front of 1.5 billion television viewers and a forum of authorities that will reflect, to a certain extent, the fragility and tensions in international relations, and the failure of French President Emmanuel Macron, weakened by the victory of the left. Doves of peace will fly across the sky, the Olympic flag will be raised, the anthems will be sung, Macron will pronounce the long-awaited ritual words that he has been rehearsing for several years, “declared open…”, the 2024 Olympic Games will officially begin, and the more than one hundred world leaders who will surround the president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, will pretend to be moved.
The Spanish monarchy, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Argentine President Javier Milei are expected to attend. The US President Joe Biden will be there – the first lady, Jill Biden, will be there – as will his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, represented by a deputy prime minister, Narendra Modi, head of the Indian government, and the Brazilian President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who will also be replaced by his wife. The US vice president and Democratic candidate for the White House, Kamala Harris, is also not expected to attend, but her husband, Doug Emhoff, will be present at the closing ceremony. Vladimir Putin, of course, has not been invited, nor will there be any Russian athletes identified by their flag and their anthem, which are banned in Olympic venues.
If the Tokyo Games, delayed until August 2021 by the pandemic, were held in a context of optimism and faith in international collaboration, the invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s Russia just six months later generated a geopolitical context that analysts who study it and the people who suffer it do not hesitate to describe as turbulent and unpredictable. The massacre perpetrated by Israel in Gaza after the Hamas terrorist attacks on October 7 added fuel to an international fire that Macron naively tried to moderate by adding his request for an Olympic truce to the ritual that the United Nations has called for every two years (also at the Winter Games) since Lillehammer 94. The prospect of Donald Trump returning to the White House in November is not encouraging for those seeking peace either. Neither conflict will stop as long as athletes from around the world fight unarmed for honour and victory, including an Israeli delegation, which claims Olympic martyr status after suffering the assault on Munich 72 by Black September. Russia is advancing on the eastern front and Benjamin Netanyahu has just announced in the United States that he will not stop attacks that have already claimed 39,000 Palestinian lives.
An Olympic competition has never stopped a war. Wars, the one in 1914 and the one in 1939, have always defeated the Games.
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