Paris Olympics: ‘The city is under siege. I just want it all to be over’

Do you like the sun? I do. I like the sun because after every single spurious tumult in history, the sun just gets on with business; it just nonchalantly rises. UK elections, French elections, American elections, the sun doesn’t care. It’s got rising to do. The sun doesn’t even remember the dinosaurs.

The sun over Paris is not like the sun over other places. The sun over Paris is an unkind sun, a sun that doesn’t really like you. A sun that’s got a lot to say for itself. It rises like blame and sits, slow-moving, in the sky like it’s judging all beneath it. That’s because it is. The Paris sun is perma-disappointed by Paris and Parisians.

Look, it’s there right now like it’s been all summer, finding fault, illuminating error. The elections happened and the Parisian sun didn’t care at all. It rose and shone on in its multitude of sulky arrays. The 14th of July, Bastille Day, passed and the sun flipped it the finger.

Now the Olympics are coming and the Paris sun has had enough. It’s been draping itself in black clouds and throwing end-of-the-world rain and thunder at us for more than a week now – all while simultaneously and sarcastically shining.

If the citizens had felt a tiny surge of hope that the far-right were rejected and a new future was possible, the sun instantly dropped the temperature by 10 degrees and is still toying seriously with the idea of hail. The sick-of-it Parisian sun clearly HATES the Olympic Games.

But nowhere near as much as Parisians hate the Olympic Games. Having been goaded by a snap legislative election, grumpily wading through the customary, street-choking clouds of tourists that every summer brings, feeling serious economic squeeze, politically and racially divided like never before, Parisians are just not in the mood. Not for fucking games, at any rate.

Street-sleepers have been gathered up and moved on (they have quite often promptly moved right back). The beloved bouquinistes (the antiquarian book sellers with stalls all along the Seine) have been closed down and disappeared, despite promises that they would not be.

Large swathes of the city centre have been zoned-off for several weeks now. Access is severely restricted and granted by smartphone codes that are very hard to get and don’t work if the sun is shining (in the summer, when, you know, the sun sometimes does shine a little).

Large numbers of people who worked in buildings within the restricted zone have been unable to get permits to go to work. Some people actually living in apartments there have also failed. And they have been literally required to go on holiday or sleep on friends’ sofas.

Important metro stations have been closed with seemingly random brutalism. Metro tickets have just doubled in price. Hotels and restaurants, expecting a gold-rush fever of clients and cash, find themselves half-empty at best (and in-zone cafes are painfully deserted). Foreign students have been kicked out of halls of residence to make way for athletes.

All police leave in the Ile-de-France region has been summarily suspended and everyone expects at least one terrorist attack. Ambulances for some clinics and hospitals have to park hundreds of metres away and patients have to be wheeled over the blocked and rickety pavements on stretchers.

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The thing has not even started properly and it already feels like a catastrophe. But it is not a catastrophe, it is an insult. It is a city delivering to its citizens the biggest fuck you in 100 years.

Everyone here has had enough. To use an old-fashioned phrase, Parisians are just really browned off. They’re done. All populations hate their politicians now (unless they’re very nearly diagnosable). But the French are at their absolute limit. The snap election was a slap in the face to the entire country. Macron, a wily apparatchik who sees Margaret Thatcher when he looks in the mirror, gambled the entire republic on fairground carny’s hunch (he got lucky but it was only luck).

In a truly Monty Python touch, the current prime minister overseeing the Paris Olympics, Gabriel Attal, has already resigned. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, is regularly booed wherever she goes. The last few days saw her swimming in the Seine in an agonising publicity stunt to show how clean the river is now (swimming has been banned for 100 years as a health risk – yeah, right back in the days when smoking was good for you). It was greeted with wild mockery and loathing.

But she doesn’t care even slightly. It simply doesn’t matter. A presidential bid is next on her blithe agenda. Popularity is nothing compared with ubiquity.

Everywhere I go, random strangers unburden themselves of their seething vexation with the uninvited misery and dysfunction already produced by the games.

Long-time Parisian, Emmanuelle told me: “I absolutely hate the Olympics. When it was announced on TV that we were going to host them, I saw it on a TV at a Club-Med swimming pool. People there were ecstatic, not because of exercise endorphins, but because they were thrilled by the prospect. They’re not thrilled now. Paris is under siege. Zone restrictions make moving around the city sometimes impossible. The streets and the Metro are like Hell. Taxes have gone up, prices too. I just want it to be October already. For it all to be over. I don’t even like October.”

Elias, clever and jaundiced, said: “The Olympics are only there to cast glitter on multinational sponsors, corporate behemoths and billionaire merchandising brands. Enough already. Parisians are just barely tolerated extras to fill the backgrounds.”

But what people mostly say is simpler. In queues at the boulangerie or supermarché, on terasses des cafes, in the barber’s chair, people just say, c’est une grosse merde, quand même (the Paris Olympics are a pile of shit). Sometimes they say that they are a blague (the Games are a joke). But a blague is worse than a joke, it’s more sordid and depressing. The Paris Olympics are a slightly suicidal seaside postcard.

These are meant to be the most inclusive and sustainable Games ever. But the ecological cost is already estimated as being titanic. ‘Inclusive’ now means that actually athletes will be sharply discouraged from wearing a hijab, but if we can get some video of a couple of black kids dancing outside a stadium they can’t afford to enter, it will be some horribly Tik-Tok-literate, corporate version of Sesame Street.

Nobody knows why the most visited city in the most visited country in Europe is flashing its ass to try to attract more tourists (and actually causing tourist numbers to go down in the process). Nobody knows why in a city so small that you can walk it from North to South in four hours, hundreds of international sporting events are being held slap-bang in the centre.

It’s like having the 100 metres in Oxford St, the Ice Hockey in Piccadilly and the Shot Put in the Barbican. Nobody knows why in the city with the worst disabled access in Europe, the Paralympics immediately follow the games and Paris’s streets and pavements will have been rendered less accessible to wheelchairs than before. Parisians are right. It is all a big sordid blague. And Parisians are the butt of the joke.

Robert McLiam Wilson is an award-winning novelist. He has lived in Paris for over 20 years

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