PARIS: As riots raged around France earlier this month, the infrastructure for next year’s Paris Olympics threatened to be engulfed in violence, adding fresh worries to organizers facing dizzying unrest a year before the Games.
Surveillance has been stepped up around the under-construction Olympic athletes’ village, media center and swimming complex in the run-down Seine-Saint-Denis area in northeast Paris, one of the hotbeds of the unrest.
The building that will house the practice pool eventually suffered minor facade damage when the adjacent bus depot caught fire and an attempted arson attack on the media center was foiled by two alert security guards.
“We were very close to a big problem,” said Nicolas Ferrand, head of the Solideo organization that is in charge of construction work at the Olympic Games.
The chaotic street scenes were an unwelcome reminder of last year’s Champions League final in Paris, which took place at the national stadium in Seine-Saint-Denis, which will host athletics events at the Olympics.
Gangs of youths have preyed on soccer fans attending the 2022 European football season’s climax, many of whom were mugged and robbed as they left the stadium.
International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach this week sought to reassure people planning to travel to Paris.
“We are very confident that the Games can and will be held in a peaceful environment,” he told reporters.
Concerns about the opening ceremony
The need to manage street crime around Olympic venues is a challenge French security forces are familiar with, former national police chief Frederic Pechenard told AFP.
“Delinquency, potentially riots or strikes are concerns for organizers, but generally secondary,” he explained.
“If I were in charge of security, which I’m fortunately not, it would be a terrorist attack that would worry me the most.”
The biggest headache is delivering what promises to be the most ambitious opening ceremony in Olympic history.
Instead of the usual parade in the athletics stadium with the center of the City of Light on the river Seine, it is going to sail past a hundred boats with sports delegations.
Up to half a million people will have tickets to witness the open-air extravaganza, which will see the fleet travel along a six-kilometre (3.7-mile) route overlooked by thousands of buildings.
Pechenard, who became a politician for the opposition Republican Party after serving as national police chief from 2007-2012, said the security services were naturally concerned.
“Everyone knows it won’t be easy to secure,” he explained. “The biggest risk is someone acting on their own who decides to cause an incident.”
Large terror plots involving multiple people are seen as easier to detect and disrupt with the intelligence services that have prevented 39 attacks in France in the past five years, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said in December last year.
Pechenard said “100% security” was impossible at any major public event and remained “optimistic” overall about the strong team responsible for security from the Ministry of the Interior to the organizing committee.
“Unprecedented security measures will be put in place,” Paris 2024 chief organizer Tony Estanguet, a three-time Olympic gold medalist in canoeing, told reporters on Tuesday. “I think it will be the safest place on the planet where you can be completely safe.
Do you need an army?
With so much space to guard around the opening ceremony and venues, security forces are relying on the help of controversial crowd-surveillance technology and private-sector manpower.
Cameras linked to AI-powered software are ready to deploy, able to detect potential hazards and suspicious movements to alert police to emerging problems before they are seen by officers on the scene.
Some left-wing EU lawmakers have warned that the system “sets a surveillance precedent never before seen in Europe”, while domestic critics fear it could be deployed permanently.
Attempts to recruit up to 22,000 private security agents have also run into trouble, with only about a quarter of the positions filled so far and industry insiders complaining that the money on offer is too low.
Home Secretary Darmanin has already raised the possibility of the armed forces being called in to fill any gaps, echoing a similar move by Britain for the 2012 London Olympics.
He is under huge pressure from President Emmanuel Macron to ensure the games go off without a hitch in front of an expected television audience of more than a billion people.
“The president wants everything to go smoothly for the country’s international image,” one minister told AFP this week on condition of anonymity. “If something goes wrong, we never forget it.”
