With just four days until the kick-off of the 2024 Summer Olympics, host city Paris is in a state of flux as it gears up for an ambitious opening ceremony on the River Seine this Friday.
More than 12 million visitors are expected to touch down in the French capital for the games, running from July 26 to August 11, but the city currently feels eerily empty.
The inhabitants of Paris’ well-heeled central neighborhoods, which will be the most impacted by the games, have gone, with the traditional summer exodus feeling more pronounced this year.
At the same time, 35,000 police officers, many drafted in from outside Paris, and 18,000 military personnel are being deployed across the city for the duration of the games in a major security operation aimed at keeping spectators and athletes safe.
They have been joined by 1,570 state security personnel from another 40 countries, ranging from European neighbors such as the UK, Germany and Spain as well as the Gulf state of Qatar, which has flown in a fleet of armored trucks.
The 33rd edition of the summer games, which were last held in Paris in 1924, will unfold across 35 sites, mainly in the French capital, with a handful of events taking place in the cities of Marseille, Nice and Lyon.
What will make these games particularly unique is the way in which many events will play out in temporary stadiums at landmark Paris sites.
The beach volleyball tournament will unfold against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower, while down the road, the Esplanade des Invalides will welcome archery, cycling and athletics.
On the other side of the Seine, the Grand Palais will be the site of the fencing and taekwondo contests, while the La Place de la Concorde has been transformed into an urban park that will host BMX, freestyle, breaking, skateboarding and 3X3 basketball contests, sports which have been added to the line-up this year in a bid to attract younger generations.
Added to these sites, the city has also set itself the challenge of holding its opening ceremony on a 6.5 km (four-mile stretch) of the Seine, rather than in a stadium. The audacious format, which has been three years in the planning and was nearly abandoned due to security fears, will be watched by 236,000 spectators on Friday evening, sitting in tiered seating on the banks and bridges of the Seine.
With athletes, spectators and media professionals just beginning to arrive in the capital, the strong police and military presence and lack of inhabitants currently makes for a strange atmosphere in the city center, with gaggles of police on every corner, and parades of police motorbikes, cars and vans racing up and down empty roads, with sirens blazing.
Some of the non-Paris officers also have the air of uniformed tourists as they get to grips with the layout of the city and the three-tier security system that came into force on July 18.
Under the scheme, a grey zone along the river and around key sites is now only accessible to people with a QR coding proving they either live, are staying in a hotel or have a reservation at a restaurant in the area, and once the games start, ticket-holders.
A wider red zone flanking the grey zone is accessible to pedestrians and cyclists and registered taxis.
Steel barricades divide the two zone, with sightseers in the red zone gathering in groups this weekend to stare into the grey zone and the handful of people still able to walk around its empty sidewalks and roads.
Restaurant and shop owners in the grey zone along the Seine have expressed frustration over the drop in business with the imposition of the river side security cordon and some are asking whether the ambitious opening ceremony will be worth the disruption to the city.
Acting interior minister Gérald Darmanin said this weekend that France had not identified any specific threat to the game but the country remains on high alert.
Memories of the November 2015 attacks in Paris and the 2016 truck atrocity in Nice still hang heavy on the collective French psyche, while heightened global tensions around Israel-Gaza war and the War in Ukraine have raised contemporary fears.
Darmanin revealed that security checks related to people involved in the games at every level – from site workers to athletes, coaches and journalists – had resulted in 4,355 people being excluded, some on suspicion of being spies, others for connections to terrorism groups.
Over the weekend, there were reports that individual Israeli athletes had been sent hate messages online, threatening a repeat of the Munich 1972 Olympics, in which 11 Israelis were murdered by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September.
The country’s Olympic Committee said it was taking the threats seriously but that it did not believe the messages posed an actual threat, with Israeli media reporting security sources as saying that the messages had been generated by a bot and not an organization.
Nonetheless, Israel has sent Shin Bet agents to Paris to protect its athletes and Darmanin also announced extra security for the Israeli team.
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