Éric Ciotti is concerned about security for the Paris 2024 Olympics. The president of the Les Républicains party suggested on Saturday that they should give up organizing the opening ceremony on the Seine.
“The attack on the Eiffel Tower showed our immense fragilities in terms of security. In this context, the scenario of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games on the Seine seems very risky to me,” declared the boss of LR in an interview with Parisian put online Saturday evening. “We have to think of a plan B, for example at the Stade de France, in a closed and secure place. I ask the government to have no taboos when it comes to the security of the French,” he added.
“Plans Bis” rather than a “plan B”
The organizers of the Games aim to organize a grandiose opening ceremony on July 26 in Paris, during which delegations of athletes will descend the Seine aboard barges in front of hundreds of thousands of spectators. The show must be regulated by the director Thomas Jolly.
The question of security during this opening ceremony was revived by the attack committed on December 2 near the Eiffel Tower by a radicalized Islamist who killed a German-Filipino tourist and injured two other people.
As early as December 4, Sports Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra assured that the relocation of this ceremony was not the government’s working “hypothesis”. “We don’t have a plan B, we have a plan A in which there are several plans Bs,” she said, emphasizing in particular the possibility of adjusting the number of spectators who will be allowed to attend.