It was on Marseille’s Corniche John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the coastal road that slings around France’s second city, that Gérald Darmanin metaphorically staged his own medal ceremony. A peculiar choice of location for this particular moment of national back-slapping given the Kennedy history, but France’s interior minister could be excused for getting a little giddy.
“It all started here, with the arrival of the Olympic flame in Marseille,” Darmanin told a lineup of gendarmes. “It’s a beautiful gold medal for the security forces.”
This was going to be the Conflict Games, staged at a time of unnerving global insecurity, with Russia said to be out to disrupt it having been prohibited from involvement, along with Belarus, as a result of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
It was being played out to the backdrop of a potential all-out regional war in the Middle East that ushered up memories of the 1972 Munich Olympics, when Palestinian militants infiltrated the Olympic village, killing 11 members of the Israel team.
A certain sense of foreboding had not been assuaged by the excitable warnings from Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, who spoke of intelligence of a plot by “Iranian terrorist proxies and other terrorist organisations who aim to carry out attacks against members of the Israeli delegation and Israeli tourists during the Olympics”.
It had looked a brave, even foolhardy decision, to turn over the crown jewels of Paris’s locations to the Olympic events and the banks of the Seine to the opening ceremony, rather than take the London 2012 route and parcel off most of it to the outskirts of the city. Such bravado certainly demanded a show of extraordinary force.
There were 45,000 police and gendarmes in the capital that Friday night, on top of 20,000 private security guards and a reserve of 10,000 soldiers, accommodated in a bespoke military base in Bois de Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris. That was the peak of the police presence but on any given day there have been 30,000 armed officers patrolling the streets, marshalling off roads and whistling frenetically at the traffic.
It is little wonder then that the organisers and politicians have enjoyed a little release of tension as the Games have come to a peaceable close. “Our vision … has been contradicted, contested, mocked, caricatured,” said Paris’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo. “It is a great pleasure to see the city the way we had planned it and to hear people thank us … fuck the reactionaries, fuck this extreme right, fuck all those who would like to lock us into the war of all against all.”
An arson attack, subsequently blamed on the extreme left, that disabled France’s high-speed railway network on the eve of the opening ceremony had forced Keir Starmer to travel to Paris by plane rather than by Eurostar but the effect on the wider Games was minimal.
There were “Free Palestine” banners at Israel’s opening football game against Mali at the Stade de France and Nurali Emomali of Tajikistan refused to shake the hands of his Israeli opponent Tohar Butbul at the end of their judo bout.
The closest the Games got to an incident of real note was perhaps in the moments before the men’s 100m final when an intruder, a 24-year-old Australian wearing a T-shirt that read “Free Palestine, Free Ukraine”, was bundled to the ground as the runners prepared to take their marks. “Is that what we were waiting for?” asked the Olympic champion, Noah Lyles. “I didn’t see anybody try to get on the field.”
Stephanie Adam, a campaigner with the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, said there had been a “repressive level of ‘security’ in Paris” but it had “failed to keep on the sidelines the vibrant protests targeting Israel’s participation despite its ongoing Gaza genocide against Palestinians”.
It was a different type of war, a cultural one, that occasionally threatened to take the shine off the athletic achievements. There was an initial outrage in some quarters at the opening ceremony, and, in particular, a segment seen by some to be a parody of the Last Supper involving drag queens, a transgender model and a semi-naked singer sitting in a fruit bowl, though those responsible stressed it was based on a painting of feasting Greek gods.
Then there was the reaction to the uncomfortable images of the Italian boxer Angela Carini abandoning her bout against the Algerian Imane Khelif after 46 seconds, claiming she had never been hit harder.
Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, a featherweight representing Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), were banned from the world championships last year by the International Boxing Association after allegedly failing chromosome eligibility tests. The International Olympic Committee said they had been registered at birth as women and had passports as such.
The tests undertaken by the IBA, led by a Russian national and stripped of its status as a regulatory body over failures to address problems relating to corruption and integrity, were said by the IOC to lack credibility.
The opening ceremony and the boxing row may seem to be unrelated but both were seized upon in the Kremlin as proof of the degeneracy of the west. “I personally watched most of the material myself,” said Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov of the opening ceremony.
“Indeed, there were some absolutely disgusting moments. We have long known the oddities of the French Republic. But that it was approved by the IOC for such a broad international audience is hard to believe.”
As for the continuing row over the two boxers, it offered an opportunity for Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, to muddy the waters further by accusing western countries of monopolising the Olympic movement and “aggressively” imposing an LGBTQ+ agenda on the rest of the world.
“At the Olympic Games in Paris female boxers are being publicly subjected to violence [by] athletes who had previously failed hormonal tests done by the International Boxing Federation and, according to the federation and according to common sense, are men,” Polyanskiy ranted at a meeting of the UN. “This is absolutely repellent.”
Gordon Crovitz, co-founder of NewsGuard, a US-based company that analyses online misinformation, said the Kremlin deserved a gold medal for the creativity of the disinformation about the Games being spread across the internet.
NewsGuard had identified 31 “misinformation narratives”, stories that were wholly untrue and seemingly designed to confuse, relating to the Paris Olympics. They had been spread in 16 languages over social media and 74 news and information websites, of which 24 had a history of publishing false, pro-Russia propaganda and disinformation, he said. They included 11 sites that belong to the Pravda network, a group of anonymously owned sites that republish content from pro-Kremlin sources and frequently advance false or egregiously misleading information. A feature of this Games had been the use of artificial intelligence to create fake videos, according to NewsGuard.
“I would say that at these Olympics Russia deserves the gold medal for disinformation,” said Crovitz. “One of the examples is the claim that the CIA had issued a video warning against riding the metro in Paris because it was going to be too dangerous. That video we found to be entirely a deep fake released first on an account on X just for that purpose and then published on pro-Russian accounts and then state media.
“Then there were reports claiming to be from BBC and [the Netherlands-based investigative journalism group] Bellingcat that were completely faked claiming there were plans to postpone the Olympics.”
There had been a Kremlin policy of denigrating everything about the Olympics, said Crovitz. But had it damaged the games? That’s not the conclusion in the Élysée Palace or the wider French public where initial indifference had turned to widespread enthusiasm, as León Marchand in the pool and the rugby sevens orchestrator Antoine Dupont claimed the golds.
“When you’re the interior minister, you take care of everything domestic – I know that people wanted this to go badly, people that didn’t have faith in the security forces,” said Darmanin in Marseille. “I’m very happy to see that France is capable of this.”
