Scary Games! The most guarded Olympics officially starts in Paris

Let the opening ceremony itself be proof of that. While athletes from 206 countries will be sailing down the Seine River, 45,000 gendarmes, 10,000 soldiers and 20,000 hired security guards will be watching from the shore. In addition, Paris will become a no-fly zone and snipers will patrol the rooftops.

“You can never rule out something happening. But at the same time, you cannot allow terrorists to rob us of such breathtaking scenery.” shows Marc Hecker of the French Institute of International Relations on the Eiffel Tower and the Trocadéro Palace stretching below, where the Olympic flame will be lit.

Stop monuments

For the first time ever, this will happen outside the stadium, which is how the organizers wanted to bring the Games closer to ordinary French people. However, especially those from the center of Paris are not very happy about it. For three weeks, a six-kilometer section in the center of the city was sealed off – from the Eiffel Tower to the Notre-Dame Cathedral, no metro is being built, tourists cannot get to the monuments, and 300,000 residents and workers who have to prove themselves with a QR code have problems.

And that sometimes the technology fails and the »native« has to wait for long minutes before someone checks him additionally? He has no choice. Arguing with armed police officers, who have the task of preventing entry to all unauthorized persons, is unnecessary. Although the stubborn French often venture into it…

Two years of preparation

The conditions are simply set so that no terrorist has a chance. Not only Parisians still have in their heads the terrible act of Islamic madmen who murdered 131 people in 2015 during the attack on the Bataclan club or the Saint-Denis stadium (where Olympic football, rugby and athletics are now played). “We have been preparing for the Games for two years. But we all hope we won’t have to intervene,” says Simon Riondet, commander of the anti-terrorist unit.