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‘If we change our way of life … they win’: Paris, terror and the ‘light-touch’ Olympics
Most host cities undergo an expensive building spree to fit the Games. Paris is making the Games fit the city.
Credit: Illustration by Getty Images
Would you like to be let in on the not-so-dark secret of the Paris Olympics? Step inside the white toned, sparsely furnished office of Paris 2024 chief executive Étienne Thobois on a sunny morning two months out from the opening ceremony, and you’ll find him sitting with the leg-crossed ease of someone who knows things are under control. “I think we are very much where we want to be at this stage,” he says matter-of-factly.
This is not the way we normally count down to an Olympics. It is the accustomed duty of journalists, one taken with the solemnity of an athlete pledging the Olympic oath, to exhaust every possibility of what could go wrong. Will the venues be built in time? Will the transport systems work? Will the host city be left with crippling debt? A personal favourite from the Sydney Games – will sharks devour triathletes in the harbour?
In the lead-in to Paris, some possibilities remain deadly serious. These Games will be staged at a time of war in Ukraine and the Middle East, in a city targeted by Islamic terrorists and Kremlin-sponsored disinformation and cyberattacks. French President Emmanuel Macron, on the day he opened the city’s new aquatic centre built for the diving and water polo competitions, declared that “without a doubt” Russia will try to undermine the Paris Olympics. And in a domestic political twist, France will vote over the next two weeks in a snap national election called by Macron to try to arrest surging support for his far-right opposition, the Rassemblement National. Yet, if you are hanging on the traditional suspense of whether Paris will be ready to host the Games come July 26, when athletes parade down the Seine and the Olympic flame arrives at the Jardins du Trocadéro at the base of the Eiffel Tower, then … spoiler alert.
President Macron at the aquatic centre.Credit: AFP
Adam Plowright, a British-born, Paris-based Olympic correspondent for Agence France-Presse, has been running the ruler over these Games for months. He notes that the budget overrun is small by historical standards, all major infrastructure has been built and the organising committee appears well run. “From the organisers’ point of view, there is no reason why this shouldn’t be a great success,” he says.
This shouldn’t surprise. Although Paris, to its chagrin, hasn’t hosted an Olympics for 100 years, it is a city well used to planning for and staging major sporting events, whether it’s the 1998 FIFA World Cup or the 2007 Rugby World Cup, which Thobois ran as chief executive. But the calmness inside Thobois’ Saint-Denis office reflects something else, too. In its approach to hosting these Games, Paris has radically departed from how other cities have done it. For the first time since the modern Olympics swelled to a gigantic scale and cost, Paris has not turned itself inside out or drained its public finances to stage the Games. Instead, the Games have been pulled apart, reimagined and reconstructed to fit Paris.
The simplest illustration of this is that within central Paris – the city of about 2 million people contained within the Périphérique, an eight-lane ring road which serves as an administrative and socio-economic border separating the Paris arrondissements from their surrounding suburbs or banlieues – only one new sports venue, an indoor stadium known as Adidas Arena, on the northern edge of the city limits, has been constructed for the Games.
The arena, where gymnastics, para weightlifting and badminton will be staged, is one of just two permanent sports facilities built for the Olympics. The other is the aquatic centre which, along with the athletes and media villages, is north of the Périphérique in the working-class, multicultural area of Seine- Saint-Denis. Nonetheless, much of these Games will be staged in central Paris, at a series of pop-up, highly Instagrammable venues: fencing and taekwondo beneath the Belle Époque glass ceiling of the Grand Palais; skateboarding and BMX cycling at the Place de la Concorde; beach volleyball beneath the Eiffel Tower; and, of course, the opening ceremony in the middle of Paris, on the waters of the Seine.
The upshot is that Paris is having its Games without the years of construction or the massive cost blow-outs that normally accompany an Olympics. Julien Rivet, a lawyer who has called Paris home since he studied at the Sorbonne 30 years ago, lives in what Parisians call “the heart”; the 1st arrondissement which runs along the right bank of the Seine. From the balcony of his apartment on the Rue du Louvre, Rivet can look south to the world’s most famous museum and west towards the Place de la Concorde, the misnomer given to the public square where French royalty and aristocrats were once led to the guillotine. On a warm night in late April, he explains that people privileged enough to live in central Paris haven’t felt much disruption from Games preparations. “There is lots of traffic, plenty of tourists, lots of noise, lots of pollution, but nothing really concrete with the Olympic Games,” he says. “It is coming, it is in the air. But in the very centre of the city, for the moment, it is pretty normal.”
An artist’s render of the Adidas Arena, the only permanent new sports venue constructed in central Paris for the Games. Credit: DPPI via AFP
Like many Parisians, Rivet isn’t planning to be in town when the Games arrive. The Olympics and Paralympics are scheduled for the mid-summer weeks when, traditionally, the city empties of residents and refills with Airbnb tourists. Rivet says the Olympics will make for a fun party but even in a normal summer, the heat and crowds can make Paris a suffocating place. When the cauldron is lit, he’ll be on a driving holiday in Utah with his wife and teenage kids. “Put it this way; the Olympic Games are not something that is going to make me stay in Paris,” he says.
Claudio Piovensa says he’s an Italian and a Parisian, having lived in the city for 22 years. A former advertising executive who runs an AI start-up, he lives a short walk from the Arc de Triomphe. Piovensa describes himself as a râleur, a word given to the particular grumpiness with which Parisians greet the minor inconveniences of life. He says the Olympics have already inflated rents in central Paris, due to the reluctance of people to give up their flats before the “gold rush” of Games ticket-holders in need of short-stay accommodation, and is worried about what will happen to the price of Métro tickets and his morning coffee and croissant, for which he pays just €3 (about $5) to enjoy standing up. When the Games are on, he also plans to be elsewhere with his family. “The Olympics is not a big deal in Paris, as far as I’m concerned,” he says. “We have so much stuff going on here. Why are we doing this to add even more stress to the town?”
Claudine Hemingway, a distant relative of the writer who chronicled 1920s Paris as a young newspaper correspondent, leads small tour groups through the city’s streets and lesser-known landmarks. She lives in a small apartment in Saint-Germain, one of the areas of central Paris which, a week before the opening ceremony, will be accessible only to residents armed with a QR code. She says some local businesses and restaurants are planning to shut, but others will make use of the longer trading hours gazetted for the Olympics. “Some people are excited about it,” she says. “The majority of Parisians, as much as I love them, they love to complain about things.”
Pierre-Olivier Beckers-Vieujant, the chair of the International Olympic Committee’s coordination commission for Paris 2024, says the “light touch” being felt by Parisians ahead of the Games is the result of the New Norm – an IOC reform agenda designed to change the way host cities experience a summer or winter Olympics.
After the grotesque spectacle of Sochi, where Vladimir Putin’s Russia spent an estimated $US55 billion – about 10 per cent of the country’s annual federal budget – to host the Winter Olympics at a purpose-built resort in the Caucasus mountains above the Black Sea, the IOC recognised that if the Games were to stay relevant, the business model had to change. The reform process that followed – a process in which Australia’s Olympic supremo John Coates was a driving force – culminated in what the IOC dubbed Agenda 2020, a more flexible, financially accountable and socially responsible blueprint for the Games.
Beckers-Vieujant, a Belgian, former head of a global retailer who joined the IOC at the start of the reform process, says Paris is the first host city to implement the new principles. “The Games were becoming more and more complex and the model of the Games was, at that time, pretty much the granting of a franchise by the IOC to a city or a region,” Beckers-Vieujant explains. “The fundamental change was to say, ‘From now on, we will stop asking the countries in the cities or regions to adapt to our strict demands. It will be the Games that will adapt to the needs and wishes of the city.’”
For Paris 2024, the headline figure for this approach is the organising committee’s claim that 95 per cent of Olympic and Paralympic events will be held in pre-existing or temporary venues. The changes go beyond that, however.
Instead of providing a dedicated, accredited transport system to ferry around Games participants, Paris will rely on its Métro, its extensive underground train network, and 60 kilometres of newly created bike lanes in central Paris, to move people to and from venues. Inside the venues, organisers have pared back the number of seats provided for media and VIPs so more paying customers can buy tickets to events. They have also cut the athlete accommodation from 17,000 to 14,000 beds. While it means some athletes will have to leave the village earlier than they might have otherwise liked, it has delivered a substantial saving to Games operations.
The organising committee has set a target of halving its carbon emissions compared to previous games, and has vowed to reduce food wastage from the 13 million meals and snacks it will prepare. “We have a common goal here with the IOC to make sure that every resource, every euro invested in the Games makes sense, and that we don’t waste any resources on things that, at the end of the day, are not that important,” says Thobois.
Paris 2024 chief executive Étienne Thobois.Credit: AFP
The bottom line is that the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games are forecast to be the first since Sydney to land for less than $US10 billion. The Paris Olympics are not coming cheap – the latest budget is €4.38 billion for Games operations and €4.4 billion for permanent and temporary infrastructure, bringing the total expense to almost $US9.5 billion. But this is substantially lower than the $US13 billion spent on Tokyo, the $US12-15 billion for London, the estimated $US43 billion sunk into Beijing or the $US13 billion that Athens cost 20 years ago. The Sydney Games cost $US5.026 billion, which in today’s Australian dollars is about $13 billion.
All summer Olympics staged this century have cost the host cities at least double what the organisers estimated they would when they bid. By contrast, the Paris infrastructure bill is 37 per cent above its starting point, with most of the increase due to the post-pandemic inflation spike, and the operating budget is forecast to finish within a respectable 15 per cent of the figure quoted in the 2016 bid documents. The only figure not yet settled is the cost to French taxpayers once all sponsorship, sales and other revenue generated by the Games has been tallied. Peter Moscivici, the head of France’s national auditor, Cour des Comptes, estimates it will come in at between €3 billion and €5 billion.
The New Norm is not merely a cost-cutting exercise. Another of its guiding principles, Beckers-Vieujant explains, is to make the Games more “useful” to the host city. There are two ways of looking at what this means for Paris. The first is to understand why Paris wanted the Games in the first place. The second is to appreciate the social impact of these Games on Paris and particularly on Seine-Saint-Denis, the youngest and poorest local government area in France.
Why did Paris want the Games? At first, the city’s socialist mayor, Anne Hidalgo, wasn’t convinced she did. When Hidalgo, a first-generation Spanish migrant who came to France as a child, was elected to office in 2014, she was sceptical about Paris having another crack at the Olympics. Three times in 20 years, Paris had bid and failed to secure the Games. In 1986 it lost to Barcelona, in 2001 to Beijing and then, in July 2005, it endured the humiliation of listening to IOC president Jacques Rogge announce the name of its cross-channel rival, London, as the host of the 2012 Olympics, despite Paris being the front-runner. Hidalgo did not believe another expensive bid was a good way to spend city money.
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo (right) with Pierre Rabadan, deputy mayor with responsibility for the Olympics.Credit: Getty Images
She has since explained that her perspective changed, along with so much else in France, on the morning of January 7, 2015, when two Algerian brothers forced their way into the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine, and killed 11 people in an al-Qaeda-inspired attack. One of the murdered journalists was a friend of Hidalgo. “I saw my city scarred after the attacks of January 2015 and I told myself, ‘We have to give hope to young people, we have to give them the possibility to think about the world with optimism, to be able to imagine themselves in a world that is going to be theirs,’” Hidalgo told ESPN shortly before Paris was announced as the 2024 host city. “All the conditions came together for me to totally commit.”
Pierre Rabadan, a former French national rugby player who captained the Parisian club Stade Français, was brought in by Hidalgo in October 2015 to help develop the Games bid. A month later, Paris experienced a series of even deadlier attacks than Charlie Hebdo when Islamic extremists killed 130 people at the Bataclan theatre, the Stade de France and other locations around the city.
Rabadan, who is now the deputy mayor with responsibility for the Olympics, Paralympics and the Seine, says that major sporting events which draw people from different cultures, nations and religions into a city to celebrate sport are anathema to Islamic extremism. He says the 2015 terror attacks hardened Paris’s resolve not only to host the Games, but also open them up in ways not previously attempted. The most spectacular example of this is the decision to shift the opening ceremony from the Stade de France to the Seine, where an estimated 320,000 spectators will line the banks of the river while a flotilla of athletes and officials make their way from the Pont d’Austerlitz to the Jardins du Trocadéro. In the same spirit, a full marathon and 10-kilometre fun run for 40,000 amateur joggers will be held along the Olympic marathon route two nights before the closing ceremony. The organisers are calling it the Marathon Pour Tout (“marathon for all”).
The risks inherent in these decisions, along with the use of so many temporary venues, are clear to the Games organisers and French authorities, who have promised to station 45,000 police and gendarmes (military police) and 2000 private security guards along the banks of the Seine for the opening ceremony. A week before the Games begin, an anti-terrorism security perimeter will be established a few blocks away from the river, with traffic cut off and residents of local arrondissements required to use a QR code to access their neighbourhood streets.
Alain Bauer, a professor of criminology at the Paris-based National Conservatory for Arts and Crafts, has described the plan for the opening ceremony as madness – an opinion he offered before France’s national security alert system, known as Vigipirate, was this year increased to emergency level following a terror attack in Moscow by an offshoot of Islamic State. In response to questions from Good Weekend, Bauer describes the security picture confronting Paris as a “very explosive cocktail”, with the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, internal social ructions in France, global distrust in institutions and militant environmental activism all part of a combustive mix. He believes the parade on the Seine should be abandoned and the opening ceremony shifted back inside the more secure Stade de France.
Macron has publicly floated this as a contingency, but Rabadan says Paris is not for turning: “We don’t want to change the feelings and way of life we have because people want to terrorise us and make us change. We know there is a danger but if we change our way of life and don’t do things because we are afraid, they win.”
The inspiration for the opening ceremony came from the 2018 Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires, where an estimated 200,000 people gathered along the Avenida 9 de Julio, the main avenue which runs through Argentina’s capital city, to watch those Games officially open. Étienne Thobois – an Olympian who represented France in badminton at the 1996 Games – credits the idea of athletes parading along the Seine to the organising committee’s artistic director, Thierry Reboul. He adds that, with hindsight, it was a no-brainer. “In Paris, the river is at the heart of the city,” he says. “That is how we came up with the physical concept of the Games.”
Beckers-Vieujant says Paris’s “smaller, lighter” opening ceremony fits perfectly with where the IOC wants to take the Olympics. “We wanted the Games to be more urban, more inclusive, more relevant for the young population,” he says. “What better way than to bring the opening ceremony where people live?”
The Austerlitz Basin is designed to prevent stormwater run-off entering the Seine. The goal is to make the polluted river fit for swimming.Credit: AFP
If you look at a map of Paris 2024 – the sporting venues, the athletes’ village, and the opening ceremony route – it is the Seine that joins the dots. Where the Périphérique separates central Paris from Seine-Saint-Denis, the river connects them. Thobois says people living in Seine-Saint-Denis – and the river itself – will benefit most from the Games legacy. “We used to say, during the bid, that the Games would be at the service of Saint-Denis and that Paris centre would be at the service of the Games.”
Saint-Denis, the post-industrial centre of Seine-Saint-Denis, has an unwanted connection to the 2015 terror attacks. It was here, in an apartment building on the Rue du Corbillon, that police commandos cornered and killed the extremists responsible. The deadly shoot-out that followed reinforced the stereotype of Saint-Denis as a hostile, no-go zone on the edge of the city. Le Figaro, a right-wing newspaper, dubbed it “Molenbeek-sur-Seine” (after the Brussels district where some of the terrorists came from). For the past five years, Paris 2024 has been headquartered in Saint-Denis, which Thobois says is undergoing “full regeneration”.
The Grand Paris Express, a major expansion of the city’s ageing Métro rail system announced 15 years ago by then-French president Nicolas Sarkozy, already connects beneath Saint-Denis station, providing locals a 20-minute commute into the centre of Paris. The full network expansion, which involves the construction of 200 kilometres of underground track beyond the Périphérique, is scheduled to be completed in 2030.
After the closing ceremony, the athletes’ and media villages will be converted into new housing estates. Once the swimming competition is over, temporary pools installed inside the Paris La Défense Arena will be pulled out and shifted to schools in Saint-Denis, where the holes are already dug and waiting. In Seine-Saint-Denis, nearly 40 per cent of residents are immigrants and an estimated 60 per cent have never been taught to swim. Thobois says that without the Games, the housing developments would have been uneconomical.
Rabadan believes that, although the problems of Seine-Saint-Denis are decades in the making, the Games provide a chance to change the script. “When you have social difficulties in a suburb or specific area, if you invest, you show people living there that they matter. If people are living better, people will come in, you have better security, the reputation will change and life will restart without all the problems they had before.”
If the Paris Olympics deliver on another bold promise, swimming lessons in Saint-Denis won’t be limited to tiled pools. One of the city’s most enduring ambitions, first pledged in 1988 by Jacques Chirac when the future French president was mayor of Paris, is to make the chronically polluted Seine fit for swimming. The river has been off-limits to bathing since 1923, when public health authorities declared it a health hazard. One of reasons is that, whenever it rains heavily in Paris, the city’s 150-year-old sewers flood into the stormwater system which, in turn, pushes untreated human waste into the Seine.
The Olympics finally convinced Paris to get its shit together, with the city, regional authorities and the national government committing to a €1.4 billion plan to clean up the Seine. The centrepiece of this plan is the newly constructed Austerlitz Basin, a 30-metre-deep, 50 metre-wide concrete reservoir built beneath the left bank of the Seine and designed to capture stormwater run-off and stop it running into the Seine. The basin can hold 46,000 cubic metres of water, which is then released back into the sewerage system for treatment.
It is a significant piece of civil engineering and, Rabadan says, one of four major works to storm-proof and upgrade the sewerage system. He says the Olympics was critical to secure support for a long-planned project which, if successful, will lead to public swimming spots opening along the Seine from next year. The idea of taking a dip in the Seine may never appeal to the râleur, but even the grumpiest Parisian would find it hard not to smile at the sight of young Parisians splashing and laughing in the heart of their city.
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