Paris simply isn’t in a fit state to host the 2024 Olympic Games
It was about the worst thing that could happen to Emmanuel Macron’s legislative campaign, two weeks before the first round of the National Assembly elections – and he has only himself to blame. The omnishambles of the Champions League Cup Final, in which Liverpool fans were penned in for hours, pepper-sprayed, and finally made the scapegoats of the whole snafu by several ministers, is looking like a harbinger of doom for the president’s second term.
Back on February 25, the day after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Uefa rightly decided to move the match away from St Petersburg. Immediately, Macron offered Paris’s Stade de France as an alternative location. It seemed like a safe bet. The 80,000-seat arena had successfully welcomed a number of high-profile games, including the 1998 World Cup, as well as concerts by the Rolling Stones, Madonna, Lady Gaga, and, of course, Johnny Hallyday, whose halfcentury career is the envy of every French politician.
Instead mistakes were piled on mistakes. These included a failure to consider the consequences of a Métro strike and permitting (possibly instructing, for fear of riots?) the police to refuse to lift a finger when fans were mugged and robbed by local gangs. They also failed to coordinate properly with British bodies that could have told their French counterparts these were not the hooligans of half a century ago, but responsible football fans. And then insulting them with baseless accusations of “industrial ticket fraud” – allegations by Gérald Darmanin, the minister of the interior, that were relayed by strategically planted “experts” on various news channels.
To be fair, French public opinion did not buy it. I took part in a couple of TV post-mortems of the fiasco, and football experts, like Football Supporters Europe director, Ronan Evain, killed off the “fraud” narrative as a transparent lie. Darmanin alleged 30,000 to 40,000 fake tickets had been produced: “If a crowd half again the size of the stadium capacity had been present, the entire surroundings would have been overrun; they were not,” said Evain.
Instead, the general outcry has been: “Can we manage to run the Rugby World Cup next year? Or the 2024 Olympics?” In a rare self-flagellating mood, the French are considering the perfect storm that years of sports, policing and urban planning complacency have wrought. The Stade de France was built in an unruly
banlieue département, the Seine-saint-denis, just north of Central Paris, as a means to bring jobs to a poor area, with high crime rates. With the same worthy aim, many of the Olympics events will take place in the same
département.
Meanwhile, in Paris itself, mayor Anne Hidalgo, fresh from a fiasco of her own, the presidential bid in which she scored 1.7 per cent of the national vote, plans to welcome Olympic events with narrowed streets,
60 per cent fewer parking spaces, and a proposal to transform the Pont d’iéna, leading from the Eiffel Tower to the Trocadéro, into a car-free garden bridge. As an early example of her organising prowess, she created last Saturday a fan zone for Liverpool fans at the Champ de Mars, in which there were neither Portaloos nor rubbish bins – with the predictable results.
Untouched by doubt, Hidalgo announced grandly that, à la Moscow, 1974, she would create special lanes for Olympic grandees to move through the city she has gridlocked. What could possibly go wrong?