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Tony Estanguet, president of the organizing committee of the Paris Olympic Games, sleeps peacefully. When, during a lunch with journalists a few days ago in an Italian restaurant on the northern outskirts of Paris, he was asked what worried him a few months before the opening ceremony, on July 26, he responded: “For me, personally, not much stuff”.
Estanguet, who in his career as a canoeist won Olympic gold in Sydney, Athens and London, added: “There is no element that shows that we are not going to achieve it.”
The Olympic village on the banks of the Seine is finished. The facilities and stadiums, ready. Everything is ready for, for the first time in a century, the capital of France to host the Games and become the center of the world this summer.
But there is something that, just over 100 days after the inauguration, worries the authorities and specialists: security. These Olympic Games will be held in a tense international context, with wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.
One threat is Russia. Paris prepares for Russian cyberattacks or disinformation campaigns. “It will be a risk,” commented the French president, Emmanuel Macron, when inaugurating the Aquatic Center this Thursday. “That’s why you have to stay firm.”
Another threat hangs over the event: terrorism. Explains Frédéric Péchenard, former director general of the national police, and today an opposition councilor in Paris: “I am restless. Organizing something like the Olympic Games is enormous and there are undoubtedly objective risks.”
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Since 2015, France has suffered several attacks and has a multitude of radical Islamists on its territory who could take action. The attack near Moscow, the Russian capital, on March 22, in which 144 people died, has reinforced alarm over the possibility that the Islamic State or a similar organization may attempt something similar in Western Europe.
The Olympic Games are a universal spectacle with audiences that can exceed one billion viewers: an appetizing setting for any demand, including the most violent ones. There is precedent: the massacre of Israeli athletes by a Palestinian group in Munich in 1972 opened an era of international terrorism.
Opening ceremony
The moment of greatest risk is the opening ceremony, which for the first time will take place outside a stadium and in an urban environment. Athletes will parade in boats along the Seine for six kilometers with Notre-Dame, the Louvre museum and the Eiffel tower as a backdrop.
“The risk has been anticipated and measured, and the means are enormous,” says Péchenard. “But the very concept of the opening ceremony, which is sure to be magnificent in aesthetic and artistic terms, causes some cold sweats regarding security.”
“We will be prepared,” Macron promised at the Aquatic Center. “If the threat evolves,” he said, “we have withdrawal scenarios.” The president thus implied that there is a plan B in case something fails at the last minute, or if new risks arise.
Paris will adapt to the current situation based on threats and capabilities to guarantee the safety of spectators and athletes. Actually, it already has.
Initially, 600,000 people were expected to be present on the banks of the Seine to follow the ceremony. Now there are 300,000. There was talk of circulating 160 boats for the athletes; Now there are 94, as Marc Guillaume, prefect of the Paris region, explained in a hearing in early March before the Senate.
In the same session, the director general of the internal security services, Céline Berthon, confirmed that “for just over a year” the terrorist threat has been growing. These are, she specified, “quite young profiles, often very active on the Internet, extremely consumers of violent content and capable of taking action quickly with rudimentary means.”
The Ministry of the Interior is verifying the identity and background of people involved in the Games, from the one million volunteers, including the Olympic flame bearers, to the 20,000 private security officers. Among the volunteers, 180,000 checks have already been carried out and 800 people have been separated, including 15 registered as a potential threat. Among private agents, a thousand have been separated, among them 102 signed.
“They are not just radical Islamists who want to take action,” Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin told the LCI network. “They could also be radical ecology people who would like to put out the flame and be able to show the whole world their cause.”
The mobilization of security forces has few precedents. There will be 45,000 police and gendarmes deployed for the opening ceremony. All attendees in the public will be subject to controls.
“I rather feel confident about the country’s security forces,” says Guillaume Farde, a professor at the Institute of Political Studies and a specialist in security issues. “What I see is that they are capable and that in the last 15 years they have faced difficult challenges.”
Farde cites the demonstration of January 11, 2015, after the attack against the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and also the Euro Cup, a year later. There were no incidents.
“Now in France there are defeatist voices that say: ‘We must stop, (the ceremony) will fail, we are heading towards catastrophe,” says the expert. “There is a method to guarantee zero risk, and that is to do nothing. The question is how much risk is assumed to be successful, because there is no success without taking risks. “What you have to do is constantly evaluate them, which is currently the case, and readjust the device based on the evolution of the threat, which is also the case.”
The criminologist Alain Bauer, who two years ago warned that the opening ceremony at that time was “criminal madness”, affirms: “Much has changed since that statement, but the risk remains very high for the public, the athletes and, therefore, the image of the Olympic Games. There are now replacement plans and in the Ministry of the Interior and the police prefecture little by little realism prevails.”
Estanguet, the president of the organizing committee, points out that security is at the core of the Olympic project from the beginning, and that Paris and France have experience. He remembers that the candidacy was announced after the attacks of January 2015: “There was then a political response that consisted of saying: ‘France will continue to defend its image, its way of life; “We will not back down.”
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