There is no party without its spoilsports. Every Olympic Games, like every collective celebration, has its dissidents, and that is not a bad thing: they illuminate the blind spots, they are the necessary counter-power that supervises and can help power to improve. “What worries me,” wrote Manuel Vázquez Montalbán in Morning Express on the eve of Barcelona 1992, “is that serious, lucid people, as far as I know, and worshippers of gods so minor that they are not even public, have lent themselves to this pilgrimage.” Paris 2024 began with a multitude of dissidents and spoilsports. France was until four days ago a nation of vazquezmontalbanes. It was rare, in the weeks and months leading up to the Games, to find anyone enthusiastic about them. What is rare, a few days later and with a country swollen with pride, is to find anyone criticising them.
So the pedestrian goes in search of the dissidents and the spoilsports, but what he finds are the forgotten, those who have other concerns than the victories of Léon Marchand, the record of Mondo Duplantis or whether the Seine is clean enough to swim in. It is dusk, the hour at which every day the magic balloon with the Olympic cauldron rises over the Tuileries garden. In the Place de la Bastille, five kilometres away, there is another kind of collective event, another galaxy. “This is a demonstration,” explains Kheira, pointing to the hundreds of tents set up. They are demanding that the State “keep its promises about the social legacy of the Olympics.” Says Abdelhak, an Algerian who has been out of work for years and living in precarious flats or, as now, in one of the tents in the Bastille: “Given what I am going through, I understand that the Olympic Games are of little interest to me.”
Among the shops, a group of African boys are chatting and the passerby approaches them and asks where they are from: “Guinea Conakry.” “Mali.” “Congo.” “I arrived three weeks ago,” says one, and another: “I have been in Paris since January.” Some passed through Italy before arriving in Paris; others, through Spain. “Las Palmas and then Madrid,” says one of them. And he explains that his name is Alahassane Diallo. That he is 15 years old. That, when he arrived in Paris, he slept under a bridge over the Seine and that one day at six in the morning the police woke him up shouting “quick, quick.” That, like the rest of his classmates here, he wants to go to school. When asked about the Olympics, Alahassane and the others respond with bewilderment, as if you were talking to them about the planet Mars. Games? What Games?
“What we have been seeing for over a year is social cleansing,” denounces Antoine de Clerck, from the association, by telephone. The other side of the picture. “[El objetivo es] “We are making invisible populations that are normally present in public spaces and are judged undesirable when we welcome television cameras and tourists from all over the world.” Between 2023 and 2024, this association has counted, in the Paris region, the expulsion of 12,545 people living on the streets, in shacks or in squatted buildings. An increase of 38.5% compared to the period of 2021 and 2022. The authorities claim that, in some cases, it was a matter of finding them a permanent residence and, in others, of allowing the installation of removable stadiums or stands along the Seine. The essayist Rockhaya Diallo adds: “It is as if France were presenting a mask, as if it were an abusive father who serves his guests well when they come to dinner.” But it is not long now: this will end in a few days. As Vázquez Montalbán said: “The Olympic Games, like the Valencian Fallas and the recorded messages of the series Mission Impossibleare destined to self-destruct.”
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