Paris: Olympic Mirage: A bit of a Disappointment

Why go to the Paris Olympics when you have almost zero interest in sports?

We imagined inserting ourselves right in the middle of a global phenomenon that everyone was talking about, but when we actually got there, the streets looked remarkably ordinary.

We knew, of course, that the athletes and the national anthems and the actual competition would be kept inside the concrete stadiums. But we had genuinely thought the excitement would spill out into the rest of the city.

It did not.

Except for a few fan zones scattered around, the Olympic spirit was safely locked away behind forty thousand metal barriers. The city looked like nothing we had seen before; all those grates across the landscape, like an absurdist art installation that someone had forgotten to remove.

The Seine was off-limits. Only people with a personal QR code were allowed to walk along the banks. Rows of policemen and soldiers in khaki stood on every other street corner. 

The interior minister had said before it all started that these would be the biggest security challenge any country had organized in peacetime, and looking around, you could see he had taken the assignment seriously.

This obsession with security is of course not new for these Olympics. There was Lockdown London, Fortress Tokyo, the arms race in Rio. Each host city seems to feel a quiet obligation to outdo the last one in organized paranoia.

We found a café that had not been requisitioned for anything, sat down, and ordered wine. Around us, Paris continued more or less as Paris. The barriers were there. The soldiers were there. 

Somewhere inside a stadium, someone was presumably winning something.

We did not have the QR codes. We had wine. It seemed like a reasonable trade.