“Handball à droite, volleyball à gauche.” For 16 days the volunteer directing crowds outside the South Paris Arena was the soundtrack to my waking hours, his megaphoned voice echoing round the Place de la Porte de Versailles and into my seventh‑floor hotel room 150 metres away across the square.
He would start at 8am. An hour earlier the convoy of gendarme trucks would have arrived, each van feeling the need to alert the entire 15th arrondissement to its arrival with a blast of its siren. They would set up their roadblocks, buy their croissants and spend the day flexing their muscles to passing Parisiens.
