Hopes and fears of a nation: Paris holds its breath as Olympic action begins

When Paris’s gigantesque, city-centre Olympic Games opening ceremony begins on Friday night, with boats full of athletes gliding side by side down the River Seine in a configuration not seen since the days of King Louis XV, there is more at stake than France’s global image.

The president, Emmanuel Macron, who has promised the Olympics will “light up people’s hearts” in a “summer of French pride”, is depending on the Games to restore morale in a deeply divided nation, which only weeks ago he had warned could be facing “civil war”.

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Quite boldly, Paris wants to outdo all previous Olympic Games on every possible front – dazzling visuals, sustainability, gender equality, even by confounding expectations as a famously meat‑eating nation by providing the most ever vegetarian food.

As Macron himself acknowledged this week at the Élysée, the opening ceremony – which will use not a stadium but the whole city as a theatrical backdrop – had at first seemed “a crazy and not very serious idea”, but these Games are all about France achieving the impossible. That dream includes France’s own steep ambitions for the medal table. After a somewhat below‑par medals haul at Tokyo in 2021, where France ranked eighth, they now want to reach the top five, which has not happened since Atlanta 1996. Gold medal hopes rest on stars such as the rugby ace Antoine Dupont, the swimmer Léon Marchand and a raft of judo stars including Teddy Riner and Clarisse Agbegnenou, as well as basketball with Victor Wembanyama and both the men and women’s handball.

But perhaps the toughest political challenge for Macron will be to harness an elusive feelgood factor of the kind that gave Jacques Chirac a bounce after the men’s World Cup in 1998.

Only weeks before these Games were due to begin, Macron stunned the country by calling a two‑round snap parliament election which was seen as so risky that some commentators initially accused him of “killing the Olympics”. In the final hour, massive tactical voting held back the far right and a left alliance finished slightly ahead, but without an absolute majority which would have allowed it to easily form a government.

This means France is in the extraordinary position of hosting the Olympic Games without a proper government. The government is led by the prime minister Gabriel Attal, who has already resigned but will stay on for the duration of the Games as king of a caretaker cabinet classified by opponents as “zombies”. When the sports minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, set out to beat the Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo to the first swim in the Seine to prove to doubters that it will indeed be clean enough for triathlon and open-water swimming events, she went about it in such a haphazard manner that she ended up sliding sideways down sludge on a cobbled stone ramp and flopped into the brown water, worrying onlookers that this was a metaphor for slapstick national politics.

Macron now hopes to hurl national politics into the long grass faster than an Olympic shot put, arguing at the Olympic Village this week that France needed a “truce” in domestic politics for the duration.

The focus now is firmly on the dazzling spectacle of the competitions. After decades of humiliating failures in bids to host the Olympics, including tearfully losing to London in 2012, the French capital has pulled out all the stops for two weeks of sporting theatrics against famous backdrops. The biggest star is the city of Paris itself. “We wanted to take the Games out of stadiums and into city centre venues,” said Aurélie Merle, sporting director of Paris 2024.

It is the first Olympics with so many sports taking place in temporary venues at famous city-centre locations, from beach volleyball beneath the Eiffel Tower, to breakdancing and skateboarding at Place de la Concorde, once the site of the high-profile executions during the French Revolution. Equestrian events will take place at the Château de Versailles.

Open‑water swimming in the Seine comes after a vast clean-up of a river where swimming had been banned since 1923 largely as a result of the health risk from unclean water and bacteria from human waste.

But just as all these lush Eiffel Tower backdrops make the Games highly Instagrammable, France knows it must avoid the trap of the Olympics becoming an Emily in Paris-style sanitised Hollywood photo opportunity that bears little resemblance to the real lives of people in the Greater Paris area.

Le revers de la médaille, a group of several NGOs including Médecins du Monde, has warned of what it called the “harassment, expulsion and invisibilisation” of thousands of homeless people and asylum seekers removed from the Paris area as part of a “clean-up” operation. Seine-Saint-Denis, the département north of Paris which remains one of the poorest in France, is hosting the Olympic Village and key events including diving in the spectacular new Aquatics Centre. By contrast, when the building of the Aquatics Centre began, research showed that as many as 74% children entering secondary school in Seine‑Saint‑Denis couldn’t swim. One of Paris 2024’s legacy goals has been to increase and improve swimming lessons for children in the area.

When Paris won the Games after the capital’s terrorist attacks of 2015, Macron said it was “a gesture that shows that in our long-term battle against terrorism, we don’t stop big events”. But the security is now so tight – with 45,000 officers at the opening ceremony alone, and a full army camp being set up on the edge of the city – that there are fears it could dampen the party mood.

Swathes of the city centre running alongside the river have been closed off and surrounded by high metal barriers ahead of the opening ceremony, sparking complaints by bar and restaurant owners that business was down and the city was turning into an open-air prison. “All these metal barriers, how could they even find so many?” asked Catherine, a research scientist, who said she would be leaving Paris to go on holiday to avoid the Games.

Getting the public on board with the costly global event has been one of politicians’ main tasks. Only three months ago, an Elabe poll found 46% of French people remained indifferent and 30% were sceptical. In the spring, while some Parisians were busy booking holidays as far away as possible, the mayor Hidalgo begged them “don’t leave this summer … it would be idiocy” and Yannick Noah, the French former tennis star and captain of the French men’s Paralympic tennis team, said: “The moaning has to stop … it’s going to be beautiful and I think there are lots of people who don’t realise that.”

Enthusiasm is now clearly increasing as crowds of locals have turned out to watch the Olympic flame meandering its way through Paris and the surrounding areas in recent days.

“A lot of Parisians wanted to leave because they thought there would be too many people, too much agitation – but actually for those of us who have stayed, you realise that the city’s much nicer, there are less people around and everyone’s kinder,” said Christophe, 36, a marketing manager out to see the flame who has bought tickets for equestrian events, archery and taekwondo.

“To be able to support athletes as a volunteer is a source of huge pride to me,” said Maxime Zerillo, 30, an osteopath from Marseille, who is among the 45,000 volunteers selected for the Olympics and Paralympics, and will be part of the medical team on hand in the southern port city which is hosting sailing and football. He said: “This is a moment when sport is bringing people together, when people can forget their worries and try to see the positive, to unite in festivities around the Games.”