There is no peace, despite all the peace. The Metro stations smell of fresh paint. Helicopters and sirens say “emergency,” but Parisians — the ones who haven’t fled — seem très nonchalant. There are 5,300 angelic volunteers, in purple or teal vests, minding every stairwell, every potential chokepoint of confusion, ushering bodies in the right direction. There are also camouflaged squads of “vigipirate,” a malign-sounding term that just means anti-terrorism. And yet the evening before the Opening Ceremonies, the 7th arrondissement felt like a ghost town.
The ceremonies, viewed not on TV but from under Pont de Sully, are splendid and tedious. Spines tingle. Knees ache. Spectators are at least 50 bodies deep at points along the riverside gardens on the Left Bank, between Pont d’Austerlitz and Pont de Sully. People perch in trees, scale public art, lounge on grass slopes, balance on steel barricades, lean on stone balustrades. The Olympics are everywhere.
It pays to be a small nation: Aruba has all the room in the world on their boat, while the Germans were packed cheek by jowl. From here, you can hear the soaring choruses of “Les Mis” while the tiny Cook Islands team motor by. The mood is good. No one knows, at this moment, about the bomb scare a couple kilometers away, at Place du Châtelet. An abandoned suitcase — maybe that should be the mascot of these “haute sécurité” games.
Instead we have the Paris 2024 mascot — a red, smiley, finned blob — that looks anatomical, even clitoral, many have observed, though it’s supposed be modeled on an 18th-century piece of headwear called a Phrygian cap (which also sounds anatomical, like something some people sometimes have to get removed.)
Protests sparked and died all week: against Israel, against the clearing of homeless encampments. Taxi drivers are on strike! No, the dancers for the Opening Ceremonies are on strike! In Saint-Étienne, someone from the Canadian women’s soccer team flew a spy drone over the practice session of its first competitor, New Zealand. Is this just the era we’re in?
All seems normal in the abnormal world. Remember: There is an ongoing war on this continent. And yet there’s a strange comfort in the family of tourists — American tourists — who decided to dress up for the queue at La Galerie Dior on Rue François.
The advertised heat hasn’t popped off yet, but the air was sweating all week, and the skies opened with rain around the time Ireland’s boat passed under Pont de Sully on Friday.
Liberté, egalité, humidité.
Amid all the rumors this week of Opening Ceremonies appearances from Gaga (true!) and Celine (we will never recover), we settled for Jill, whose heart, it seems, will go on. She was in the Oval Office on Wednesday night, just off camera, as President Biden spoke of the torch — not the Olympic one, but the metaphysical one that he’s decided to pass. Ninety minutes later, the first lady boarded Executive One Foxtrot to lead the U.S. delegation to Paris, as if tout est bien.
“Biden jette l’éponge” was a headline in Le Figaro (“throws in the towel”).
A chyron on France 5: “Kamala Harris, le Cauchemar de Trump?” (That would be “nightmare.”)
“Generations of Americans before us led the fight for freedom,” Harris said Tuesday at a rally outside Milwaukee. “And now, Wisconsin, the baton is in our hands.”
Torch/baton symbolism abounds lately. Pass ’em along. Replace the present tense with the present perfect continuous. What is will soon be what was.
“President Biden has led our country with that hope always in his heart,” Jill Biden said Thursday in the 8th arrondissement, in the garden of the opulent residence of the U.S. ambassador to France. The couple hundred guests — mostly family members of athletes — began to clap. They heard the tense, maybe felt a release of tension. “Has led.”
The first lady looked grateful for the applause, and perhaps wistful, too. “Thank you,” she continued, American flags fluttering behind her from the residence. “I’ll take that home to him. And as he says: There is nothing America can’t do when we do it together. And we see that especially now, at the Olympics.” An hour later, la première dame was at Team USA’s training facility in Eaubonne, passing a literal baton to sprinters, in a stationary relay handoff staged for the cameras, accompanied by game chants of “U-S-A, U-S-A.”
But what of the host country, whose snap elections earlier this month have garbled the government? Things in France are as unprecedented as things in the states.
“I can tell you that the mood is not for games,” said Vincent Michelot, on the phone from Lyon, where he is a professor of American politics. “I’ve been studying political science and history for the last 45 years, and this is the strangest political moment I’ve ever experienced in France. The institutions seem to be at a dead end. Everybody’s talking about the Sixth Republic, but the Fifth Republic just won’t die.”
Pass the torch to a new generation? Or just pass the torch to Snoop Dogg (in French: “Snuup Doug”), who carried the flame Friday morning through the streets of Saint-Denis. He wore white athletic gear and gold-colored sneakers.
On a press call this week, a journalist from Billboard asked Snoop how he would field a team to win a gold medal for rapping. (Why not have a gold medal for rapping? NBC needs a new generation of viewers to pay attention. Only 56 percent of Americans are even aware that the games are being held in France, according to a Gallup poll released Thursday; over the past 24 Olympiads, there’s been a 27 percent drop in interest among Americans younger than 50. Maybe the Sixth Republic can’t be built out of TikToks.)
Anyway. “So this is rap Olympics you’re talking about?” Snoop replied. “I definitely would take Eminem. … Definitely would take Rakim. Then I would go grab a female … Queen Latifah. And naturally I gotta take Snoop Dogg. … I mean, dream team.”
On Friday morning, a “massive” and “malicious” arson attack paralyzed three high-speed rail lines, according to France’s national rail service. Climate activists were planning a disruptive protest for Saturday.
Are we in the mood for games? Monday was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth. Two days later, the 2034 Winter Olympics were awarded to Salt Lake City. Bonne chance with that! Just keep passing that torch. Celine, please take it, and save us all.
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