Barry Diller has lashed out at the level of security in central Paris in the lead up to the opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympic games on Friday, which will break with tradition by unfolding on the River Seine rather than in a stadium.
France has mounted an unprecedented security operation drafting in 45,000 police officers and 18,000 army personnel into the French capital, with the center locked down under three-tier security zone system, which puts a grey zone near the river and areas around key Olympic venues off-limits for most people.
“The Olympics is this brotherhood of friendliness and sport, and all good things and we’re doing it literally in an armed camp,” Diller told CNBC’s Squark Box host Andrew Ross Sorkin in an interview in its Olympics studio in Paris.
As he spoke against the backdrop of the Arc de Triomphe, the interview was punctuated with the sound of police sirens.
“I mean, you hear it in the background, you cannot go outside and not hear constant sirens. I’ve never seen so much… so many different armed vehicles and machine guns and everything else.,” he continued. “It’s weird in this city that is usually joyous and peaceful.”
He was speaking just hours after a rogue sabotage attack on high-speed rail lines leading in and out of Paris in the early hours of Friday, which brought severe disruption to the French rail network, on what was already due to be a complicated travel day due to the opening ceremony and the peak vacation season.
Billionaire media mogul and Olympics regular Diller is among a raft of U.S. media and entertainment A-listers to have jetted into Paris for the 2024 games and its high stakes opening ceremony. He was also a guest at the swanky ‘Prelude To The Olympics’ party at the Fondation Louis Vuitton on Thursday evening.
As a board member of the Coca Cola, which is major sponsor of the games, Diller is staying at the hotel housing Coca Cola execs in the grey zone, which is also hosting First Lady Jill Biden, who is representing President Joe Biden in Paris.
Diller suggested a snafu about access to the hotel on Thursday evening after the Prelude party due to the tight security restrictions nearly resulted in him being taken out by secret services agents.
“I nearly got shot by the secret service last night,” he recounted “Although we have an apartment here, I couldn’t go to it because it’s in the red zone. So I’m at the Coca Cola hotel.”
“Unfortunately, Mrs Biden is at the Coca Cola hotel. I came back last night bedraggled from the day and all this noise and I go to get through the barrier and they wouldn’t let me through. Thirty minutes later, I thought, ‘You know what screw it, I am an American citizen’… and I started walking through and it was close, they nearly tackled me.”
Diller was one of the big Democrat backers leading the charge calling for Biden to step down as the Democrat candidate in the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
Sorkin jokingly suggested that the mogul’s treatment at the hotel had nothing to with his campaign against Biden.
“No, I do think it did, because she [Jill Biden] clearly hates me because I was involved in the process.”
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