“We are all very impatient,” quivered Tony Estanguet on France Inter airwaves This Friday, July 26, on the morning of the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. It has been seven years, since the official designation in Lima, that the president of the organizing committee of the Games and his teams have been preparing for this moment.
“The Olympic Games are hosted once a century,” Emmanuel Macron measured during his speech on July 23, aware of the stakes hanging over the success of the event. Especially since it is organized in a tense political context, after the dissolution of the National Assembly, and in an international context marked by the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine. So to start these Olympic Games off right made in FranceL’Express offers you ten essential articles, like so many events in the decathlon, on the behind the scenes of a global competition.
Before the opening ceremony, these five threats that still weigh on the Paris Olympics
The opening ceremony is not the only goal of those who want to disrupt the Olympic Games. 48 cables burned in five departments, 800,000 passengers affected, the TGV network largely disrupted. The arson attacks started on the SNCF network during the night from Thursday to Friday mark the beginning of hostilities against the Olympic Games. But other major threats will continue throughout the competition. L’Express has identified five of them.
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Opening Ceremony, the secrets of a crazy idea: “If you don’t want it, I’ll stop breathing”
It is the best-kept secret of these Olympic Games: the opening ceremony and the details of what promises to be the greatest show of the century. It took five years to design, almost to the day. For the first time in the history of the Olympics, the great celebration that marks the official start of the events will take place outside of a stadium, on a river, the Seine, and in the very heart of the host city. An unprecedented spectacle… and one that is more secure than ever.
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Aya Nakamura singing Piaf: Emmanuel Macron’s secret demands for the 2024 Olympics
Aya Nakamura is not Gabriel Attal. When the singer of the hit Djadja crosses, in a discreet black suit and on the sly, the courtyard of the Elysée on February 19, does she imagine that she is about to submit to an interrogation conducted by the President of the Republic himself? Fascinated by athletes and by the image that the Olympic Games could send of France and its presidency, the Head of State is sometimes an artistic director, sometimes a sports coach. What are his ideas, his desires, his projects? L’Express was the first media to reveal the meeting between Emmanuel Macron and the most “streamed” French-speaking singer in the world.
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Paris 2024 Olympics: How Club France Found Itself in the Red
On 40,000 square meters, including 15,000 indoors, there will be sports events, artistic performances and broadcasts of the events on a giant screen every day during the Olympic period. On July 27, the Club France – a tradition since 1988 and the Seoul Olympics – will open its doors in the Grande Halle de la Villette, in the 19th arrondissement of the capital. But it could show a massive deficit at the end of the Olympic and Paralympic events. Enough to spoil the party.
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Flu, dengue fever, Covid… The Paris Olympics, a future breeding ground for epidemics?
Major sporting events have so far rarely been linked to major epidemics. But the authorities must anticipate all scenarios. More than 10,000 athletes, 45,000 volunteers, 12 million spectators and 25,000 journalists. The figures are known, they are dizzying. With such a mass of visitors gathered for two short festive weeks in Paris and the Ile-de-France region, the question of health risks arises during the Olympic Games.
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Paris 2024 to mend French society? The truth about the “magical” power of the Olympics
Sport generates lasting emotions, sometimes national pride. Last February, an advisor to the Elysée Palace told L’Express about Emmanuel Macron and Paris 2024: “He wants to make these Games a unifying moment, an antidote to archipelagoization.” Wow! Monumental and so necessary ambition, what can we do with these sixteen days as an opportunity to repair French society, to reunite these scattered parts of the country for good.
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David Lappartient, the most powerful Frenchman in world sport: his ambitions, his secrets
His incredible involvement in the evacuation of twelve Afghan Olympic athletes during the fall of Kabul is a good illustration of the character that is David Lappartient. A man at the crossroads of diplomacy, politics and sport who loves nothing more than chiaroscuro. Power without the light. Pulling the strings, of course, without ever being condemned to the folding seats. The president of the French National Olympic Committee wears many hats. And has great ambition.
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Sebastian Coe: “The Olympic opening ceremony must galvanize and also provoke”
A former 1,500-metre champion – double Olympic medallist in 1980 and 1984 – the Briton was the great architect of the success of the 2012 London Games, to which those in Paris are often compared. Sebastian Coe, who became a lord under Tony Blair in 2000, has been head of World Athletics, the international athletics federation, the premier discipline of the Olympic Games, since 2015. He gives his advice for Paris 2024.
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Doping: Can the 2024 Paris Olympics avoid a scandal?
Flashback: London Olympics, 2012. Nine athletes tested positive during the competition, a relatively small number. Ten years later, in 2022, the reality is quite different: 73 anti-doping rule violations were found after new analyses of 2,727 samples; 31 medals were withdrawn and 46 re-awarded. Of course, these Games were hit hard by the Russian state doping scandal, but the observation is bitter. Twelve years later, will the Paris 2024 Olympics manage to avoid such bad publicity? The Organizing Committee (Cojop) and the global anti-doping community have been refining their arsenal for several years now.
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Paris 2024, the secret history of the Games: our big investigation
Emmanuel Macron has placed the Olympic Games at the heart of his five-year term. “The climax of his mandate”, “an event that will place the country at the center of the world for two months”, “the most beautiful Games in history”, “an event worthy of the Universal Exhibition of 1889”, boast his advisers. Six months before the opening ceremony, L’Express investigated the genesis of the 2024 Olympic Games and even the last black spots of this meeting with major economic and political stakes.
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