Six months before the Paris Olympics, in a tense international context, the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin announced, Wednesday January 31, a spectator gauge for the opening ceremony significantly revised downwards, with 300,000 spectators, very far from the initial ambitions.
For months, the question of the number of spectators able to attend the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics on the Seine, for the first time in history outside a stadium, was at the heart of negotiations between the authorities and the organizers of the 2024 Olympics.
And since the last figure of 600,000 spectators publicly stated by Gérald Darmanin in October 2022, numerous police sources and some close to the organization of the 2024 Olympics have mentioned anonymously, behind the scenes, a number regularly revised downwards.
“Security fears”
“The idea is that there are 100,000 people on the lower quays”, with paid tickets, said Gérald Darmanin on Wednesday on France 2, and “more than 220,000 people on the high quays”, with free tickets.
Far, very far from “2 million spectators”, a scenario on which Paris City Hall and the organizers were working more than two years ago, according to a source close to the negotiations.
The international context, with the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the war triggered by an unprecedented attack launched by Hamas in Israel on October 7, combined with the level of terrorist threat noted in France after the Arras attack in October 2023 where a teacher was killed, had been pleading for months for a reduced gauge.
Several political leaders, including the president of the Ile-de-France region Valérie Pécresse, had publicly pleaded for a significant reduction in the number of spectators; others, like the former Minister of Sports David Douillet, asked for the implementation of a Plan B, a hypothesis ruled out by the organizers.
The Minister of Sports Amélie Oudéa-Castéra had raised in public opinion the hypothesis of a reduction in this gauge in spring 2023, citing a figure of “400,000” free places, specifying that this number was not yet finalized. It’s done now, at an even lower level.
From the start, the organizers, supported by the Paris town hall, had encountered reluctance and fears from the police authorities. The former Paris police prefect, Didier Lallement, in office from 2019 to 2022, had even “on several occasions expressed during tough meetings his opposition even to the ceremony on the Seine”, according to a source close to the discussions.
This river parade of 115 boats, delegations of athletes, over six kilometers from the Pont d’Austerlitz to the Pont d’Iéna, in the presence of heads of state and government from around the world, gives police officials a cold sweat.
“This is a first and therefore technically it is difficult, there are many security fears,” a senior official explained to AFP on condition of anonymity several weeks ago.
“Eyes bigger than your stomach”
“Their initial estimates are too high, just technically so that people can see something. We also have to take into account the evacuations of the public in the event of panic, and all that, the organizers are aware of,” he added. . The arrival of Laurent Nunez at the Paris police headquarters has, according to several sources, “made it possible to resume a constructive dialogue with the organizers”. This drop in the gauge seems in any case to have somewhat reassured police officials.
“They had eyes bigger than their stomachs. We had asked to revise the device down because it was going to be complicated to hold it,” estimates a police source with AFP.
This announcement was also welcomed by Valérie Pécresse during the permanent commission of the IDF region on Wednesday. “This is a request that had been made by Ile-de-France Mobilités for months,” she recalled shortly after the Minister of the Interior’s announcement. “We were fighting to obtain the reduction of this gauge which had inconsiderately been placed at one million spectators by the city of Paris then lowered to 650,000,” she added.
“Today we are at 300,000, that seems to us to be a much more reasonable gauge to allow both the safety and security of spectators but also passenger flows on public transport.”