It was a type of mornings when the colour of the sky and the information made you need to crawl again beneath the covers. Scheduled for 7:30 pm on Friday, July 26, issues weren’t wanting good for “CER 1” – the code title for the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Video games.
For the primary time in Olympic historical past, the opening ceremony moved away from a stadium to embark 8,700 of the world’s greatest athletes on a six-kilometer river parade alongside the Seine, with the banks lined with acts performing in a present billed as “the best spectacle on this planet” by its director, Thomas Jolly. However low, heavy clouds have been simply ready to bathe the 85 boats and 326,000 spectators anticipated on the quays, beneath the mocking gaze of a billion tv viewers.
The legendary Olympic spirit didn’t even prevail within the workforce sports activities occasions, which started two days earlier at some venues, for logistical causes. In Saint-Etienne, southern France, on July 24, Morocco defeated Argentina 2-1 within the opening match of the boys’s soccer match, after a four-hour match interrupted by clashes between supporters and ending in an empty stadium. On the Stade de France, the French rugby sevens workforce – who drew (12-12) with the US, gained (19-12) towards Uruguay, misplaced (19-12) to Fiji and gained (26-14) towards Argentina within the quarter-finals – have been struggling to impress.
However there was one thing far more critical happening that weekend, with the busy summer time travels and the final of the Video games’ spectators making their solution to the capital. For months, questions had been raised concerning the potential of the French transport system to deal with the distinctive flows of site visitors. In a single day, France’s rail community was the goal of a coordinated assault on an unprecedented scale, plunging France into anguish.
Between 3 and 5 am, 1000’s of cables transmitting security info to drivers have been intentionally set on hearth. Three high-speed routes got here to a standstill; the assault on the southeast route was foiled on the final minute by the nationwide rail operator’s brokers. Chaos reigned within the stations, with 800,000 passengers affected. “It is a piece of France, and it is the French who’re being attacked,” stated railway CEO Jean-Pierre Farandou, lambasting the actions of “a bunch of crackpots and irresponsible individuals.”
Satisfied by preliminary findings that the sabotage was “low-level criminality and doesn’t sign any incidents through the opening ceremony of the Olympic Video games,” police prefect Laurent Nuñez assigned additional workers to Paris stations to assist passengers with canceled trains. On French radio station France Inter, Tony Estanguet, president of the Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Video games, promised France, which had been and not using a authorities for 11 days, {that a} “nice second” that will “do us plenty of good.” Gérald Darmanin, the caretaker inside minister, identified that for the police, in motion for the reason that arrival of the Olympic flame in Marseille on Could 8, the Video games had begun a very long time in the past.
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