Despite the terrorist attack which took place on Saturday a few hundred meters from the Eiffel Tower, the Minister of Sports, Amélie Oudéa-Castera assured that the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games will take place on the Seine. Relocating it is not “a hypothesis”.
The Minister of Sports Amélie Oudéa-Castera assured Monday morning that relocating the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, planned on the Seine to Paris next summer, was not “a hypothesis” currently considered, despite the terrorist risk . “We don’t have a plan B, we have a plan A in which there are several plans B,” she said on France Inter.
“A certain number of adjustment variables”
Two days after the attack on the Bir-Hakeim bridge in Paris, where a terrorist registered for Islamist radicalization and known for psychiatric disorders killed a German tourist with a knife and injured two other people with a hammer, the Minister of Sports recalled that the “terrorist threat and in particular the Islamist threat exists”.
However, “it is not new and it is neither specific to France nor specific to the Games”, underlined the minister, who ensures that she is putting “everything in order to reduce it as much as possible with an absolute state of vigilance” . The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games is due to take place at the end of July on the Seine, between the Pont d’Austerlitz and the Pont d’Iéna. The minister indicated that there was no “plan B”. “There are a certain number of adjustment variables,” she nevertheless clarified.
She cited in particular the number of spectators during this ceremony, which will be fixed in the spring, and which can be “modulated”. These adjustments will also concern “the number of festivities which will be authorized around the area and in Paris” and “the management of security perimeters”. Asked whether the relocation of the ceremony was part of the “second plans”, the minister declared: “this is not the hypothesis on which we are working”.