2024 games

PARIS — The message has been hardly subtle: The grandeur of the Games is coming back.

Organizers of the 2024 Paris Summer Games this week loaded journalists from around the world on buses for a first peek at the progress of Olympics sites, part of the long run-up to the Games, still 20 months away. One of the first stops: the Eiffel Tower, on a dazzlingly sunny autumn day, to see the spot near the foot of the monument where the temporary beach volleyball venue will be built.

From there, the whirlwind tour continued, from a new aquatics center that will not host swimming to the famed clay courts of Roland Garros, which will host not only tennis but boxing, too. All along the circuitous route, organizers doled out regular cultural and historical asides on the collections at the Louvre, the reconstruction of Notre Dame and the renovation of the Grand Palais as they repeatedly crisscrossed the Seine. It is there where organizers plan one of the most ambitious gambits of any Games: an opening ceremony not confined to a stadium, but instead sailing along on boats and barges before hundreds of thousands of spectators on the river’s banks.

The broader message was clear at every stop: After dismal moods and empty arenas at the Tokyo Summer Games, postponed to 2021, and the Beijing Winter Games, held in February in a closed coronavirus bubble, the Paris Games are pledging to deliver the comeback of comebacks.

Over several days of briefings and meetings, mostly without masks, the pandemic hardly came up. Instead, the pride of being able to showcase a much-loved city seemed nearly palpable.

“We feel fortunate to be able to have the opportunity and, cross fingers, to have full stadiums because that is what it is all about for the athletes,” Étienne Thobois, the chief executive of the Paris 2024 organizing committee, said in an interview. “Fantastic scenery and fantastic infrastructure — and that’s what Tokyo was able to provide. But here hopefully we’ll have the opportunity to welcome the world.”

Yet it’s also clear the organizers will be wrestling with anxiety. As pandemic concerns recede, at least at the moment, the more typical but no less daunting ones around the Games — security, traffic, disruptions of all kinds — are intensifying.

Take the plan for the opening ceremony on the Seine, the showcase that could give these Games their indelible image — and the International Olympic Committee its biggest headache.

Breaking with longstanding tradition of holding the opening ceremony in the primary stadium of the Games, Paris plans to put the 10,500 athletes, or at least the thousands who choose to participate in the ceremony, on a flotilla of 160 boats down the Seine. The nautical parade of nations is meant to symbolize openness and celebrate the famed vistas of this city, and President Emmanuel Macron of France has endorsed it. Pulling it off, however, is another matter.

Thomas Collomb, a top security official for the organizing committee, said in a telephone interview that the organizers had been working “hand in hand” with the French and Paris governments, the police and other authorities, to develop a plan for the ceremony and security at the Games in general.

“We are preparing for all scenarios,” he said. “We need to be humble and innovative to meet all challenges.”

Collomb said, for instance, that the organizers were recruiting thousands of security guards to supplement the police. The former will be in charge of securing Games venues, with the latter deployed in public spaces.

Still, doubts over the level of preparedness were raised after a chaotic Champions League soccer final near Paris only a few months ago. Rising inflation could add to the price tag for the Games. And official auditors are preparing to release a report later this year that in early drafts suggested the pace of preparations was slow and the budgeting ill-defined for the “considerable security challenge” of the Games, according to reports in the French news media.

The report suggested, for instance, that the number of boats taking part in the opening ceremony should be reduced, and it said that “any mismanaged event occurring during the Olympic period that endangers the safety and security of citizens and visitors” would “tarnish not only the image of the Games but also that of France on the international scene.”

Then there is the French tradition of strikes and other labor disruptions. Thobois said organizers have been working closely with unions on a compact to avoid making the Games a bargaining chip, well aware that part of the chaos around the Champions League game in May was the result of a crippling strike on one of the major commuter rails in the city on the day of the match. Those lines ferry millions of people across Paris every day, and are a huge component of the Games’ logistics and transportation plans.

“We are not completely safe from a similar disruption,” said Marc Pélissier, the president of an association of public transportation users in the Paris region.

Of course, the Games are still nearly two years away, a point organizers repeatedly made in response to questions from international reporters this week over everything from hotel accommodations to internet access to transportation across the throbbing megalopolis.

“We’ve got thousands of problems to solve every day,” Thobois said.

But, he added, “our biggest challenge is to keep the ambition, is to keep the dream alive, is to allow people to be part of it and go beyond the difficulties to stay strong on the ambition.”

Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting.