In December, after a man with a knife and hammer killed a German tourist near the Eiffel Tower, the French sports minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castréa told France Inter radio, looking ahead to the opening ceremony for the Paris 2024 Summer Games, that there was no Plan B.
Casual reminder: public figures and public officials may not readily be given at all times to the truth.
“We have no plan B, we have a plan in which there are several sub-plans with a certain number of adjustment variables,” she said, and even making allowances for French translated into English nothing after the comma makes any sense whatsoever.
To be clear, the minister was asked point blank that December day if the authorities were thinking about any changes to the plan to hold a significant chunk of the ceremony on the River Seine, athletes in a flotilla of boats heading toward the Eiffel for six kilometers, about three and a half miles: “This is not something we’re working with.”
Emmanuel Macron and Thomas Bach last year at the Élysée Palace // IOC
On Monday, the president of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, said in an interview with the BFMTV and RMC outlets there was in fact not only a Plan B but a Plan C: Plan B would be “limited to the Trocadero,” across from the Eiffel, Plan C, “even moved to the Stade de France,” a traditional stadium-style event.
“We will analyze this in real time,” Macron said.
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This column has been banging this drum for four months, seemingly the only outlet in the Western press to do so.
It is absurd, absolutely ridiculous, that the rest of the world is just catching up today. It speaks to the antisemitism that the events of October 7 brought back to the forefront.
Don’t like that? Too bad.
The fundamental job of journalism is to speak truth to power.
The job here is to make sure that everyone gets through the opening ceremony safely.
The people most at risk are the Jews. That is, the Israeli team.
My connection to the Olympics began in earnest with the Munich Games. I was 13, almost 14. I was living in rural Ohio, northwest of Dayton. My Bar Mitzvah had happened the year before. With horror, I watched in September 1972 as 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were kidnapped and murdered, the entire thing playing out live, in black and white, on ABC.
“They’re all gone,” Jim McKay would intone, referring to the Israelis.
As the years progressed, one of the great privileges of my life was not only meeting but becoming professional colleagues—and, indeed, friends—with McKay. He taught me much.
To speak truth to power.
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The IOC spent years, too many, in getting to an appropriate recognition of the memory of the slain Israelis. The current president, Thomas Bach, who is German, has been a leader in trying to make right what had been wrong.
The IOC, though, still has a serious blind spot when it comes to the Israelis. Too often, athletes from Iran, in particular, are allowed to manipulate the system.
When an Iranian athlete is matched up against an Israeli, the Iranian has found reason to, say, fall ill. Afterward, back home, he or she is lauded as a hero of the state.
This is complicated, because an Iranian athlete who would dare defy the regime might likely find himself or herself in mortal danger. The issue is not the athlete. It’s the regime. The IOC has not sought to confront — or seemingly even negotiate with in significant fashion — the regime.
And so this charade, excuse after excuse, has been allowed to play out for years. And it’s not just the Iranians. Others in the Olympic landscape and, beyond, in international sport, find reason to target Israel. Last year, for instance, the men’s under-20 soccer world cup was moved out of Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim state, because of the anti-Israel chorus there.
This is unacceptable, plain and simple. It’s antisemitism.
The single entity that has done the right thing is the International Judo Federation, led by Marius Vizer, who deserves kudos. The judoka Saeid Mollaei fled in 2019 to Europe after being ordered by the Iranian authorities to lose in order to avoid competing against the Israeli Sagi Muki; the two have since become good friends; at Tokyo 2020, Mollaei, then competing for Mongolia (now for Azerbaijan) dedicated his silver medal in the 81-kilo class to Israel. The judo federation, in the meantime, had banned Iran for what turned out to be four years, through September 2023.
At any rate, we now find ourselves in a world in which antisemitism is raging, Muki among those on the Israeli judo team protested in Japan recently by pro-Palestinian activists.
Anyone who thinks the Paris Games aren’t going to offer a platform for that antisemitism to manifest – France is home to the world’s third-largest population of Jews, after Israel and the United States – is naïve or willfully blind.
Macron also sought Monday to draw a distinction between Russia (not allowed at the Games but for a few “neutral” athletes) and Israel (allowed), observing Israel had been what he called the “victim” of a terrorist attack: “This is why the Israeli flag will be there. The athletes will be there and I also hope that they will be vectors of peace because they will have to compete with many actors in the region.”
Read that out loud, again, and ask if hoping the Israel athletes will be “vectors of peace” is – enough.
This is why the opening-ceremony-on-the-river idea is so, in a word, stupid.
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This is all happening as the Olympic movement finds itself at an inflection point. The biggest problem with this Seine idea is that the very last thing the movement can afford—it’s far from certain it can withstand it—is a terror attack, live and no longer in 1972-style fuzzy black-and-white but in crystal-clear 4K resolution, at the Paris opening ceremony.
“I’m most excited that we get to, in some ways, reintroduce the country to the Olympic and Paralympic Games. It’s been a minute,” Sarah Hirshland, the chief executive of the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, said at a news conference Monday in New York. After the far-away, COVID-affected Games in Beijing and Tokyo, Paris is to mark a new beginning.
The Paris 2024 slogan is “Games wide open.” As part of the new beginning, the ceremony is a big welcome — that’s part of the thinking behind the Seine thing.
OK, but what if the opening ceremony gets blown wide open? What then?
Why run that risk?
In news that may not seem related to all this but 100% is, Rachel Axon of Sports Business Journal reported Monday – bravo, Rachel, for the scoop – that Salesforce is out as a sponsor of the LA28 Games, ending an agreement signed three years ago. LA28 is left with but two top-tier sponsors: Delta and Comcast.
No sponsors have signed on for top-tier LA28 deals since Salesforce, in 2021.
The No. 1 issue confronting the Olympics is being relevant. It’s no mystery that having the NFL and the NBA and, elsewhere, soccer, always soccer, on TV or some screen all the time prompts the duh question – if I am 19 years old, why do I care every fourth summer about some random swimmer from somewhere?
Probable answer: I don’t.
The 19-year-old thinks maybe my middle-aged mom cares about gymnastics or figure skating. But, dude, whatever.
Go ask your 19-year-olds – I am with them all the time at USC – to name one international sports figure not playing soccer or in the NBA. Odds are they cannot.
LeBron, sure. Messi, absolutely.
Phelps and Bolt? Neither has competed in years. (You want to feel old? Phelps is the father of four boys.)
This is why Olympic TV ratings have dropped measurably, indeed significantly, since London 2012, both globally and in the United States, and it’s why the very last thing anyone needs is an incident at the opening ceremony.
Fifty years ago, the year after the Munich Olympics, Secretariat riveted America and the world with his run to the Triple Crown. The Olympics – we live in a world of disruption – run a not-fanciful risk of turning, perhaps sooner than later, into the ratings version of 21st-century horse racing. Who wants a mint julep? The hammer thrower dude from that place I can’t pronounce is in the circle!
My brother-in-law, who is a surf bum in Costa Rica for most of each year, is visiting us this week and was genuinely puzzled about the Paris flotilla. For reference, this is someone who, with a friend, built a self-styled “pirate boat,” a trimaran, with the idea of cruising from Costa Rica to Vancouver—meaning he is hardly risk averse—but the ship, alas, did not make it out of their home bay. Long story.
At any rate, when informed that the cultural underpinning of an opening ceremony in Paris was to regale all with France's glories, he said, in reference to the boats, “Can’t they do that another way?”
He added, and for reference 1/ he does not follow the Olympics and 2/ though I have been married to his sister for 32 years he literally had no idea until Monday this website has been around for 14 of those 32, no stress, he is who he is, “When circumstances come up that make the plan less than ideal, you have to be flexible and change the plan.”
Bingo.
Incredibly, he had this genius suggestion: send the mascots, the Phryges, down the river. That would save face. And money. In the stadium, show that on the big screens to big cheers.
“It’s really not that hard to see,” he said.
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What did it take for the Plan B and C idea to finally become public?
Was it Iran sending 300 missiles toward Israel? Did that snap everyone to, finally?
Saudi Arabia, the KAN news outlet reported, confirmed its participation along with Israel, the United States, Britain, Jordan and France, in a new ‘coalition’ that repelled the Iranian attack. France? The fundamentalists who oppose what the West stands for will receive that news – how?
In the meantime: Bach made a quiet trip to the Élysée Palace in recent days, after an Olympic get-together in Birmingham, England. As is typically said in Olympic parlance, there was an exchange of views.
Truly, this is not that difficult.
For 80 years, the mantra in the West, after the revelations of the Holocaust, has been ‘never again.’
Never again is now.
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For some reason, nearly every report one might read elsewhere about this misadventure in the works tends to gloss over the No. 1 question:
Would you want to be in one of those boats?
The answer, and I’ve asked dozens of people, is easy: no way.
“They have everything planned,” which they do not, “and it’s going to be a well-orchestrated symphony that day,” Nicole Deal, head of security for the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee said at that same news conference alongside Ms. Hirshland, in this context referring to the French authorities.
With the proviso that statements of opinion about future events are not actionable, how, nonetheless, would Ms. Deal feel if the worst came to pass and that statement was read back to her in a deposition or in a court of law by grieving parents? Would that reflect well on her or the USOPC?
Can she guarantee with 100% certainty it’s going to be a “well-orchestrated symphony”? Of course not. The 2018 opening ceremony in PyeongChang was disrupted. Who knows what might happen in Paris in 2024?
Ms. Deal further said no athletes had shared misgivings about the Seine plan. Cool. Here’s a question or two:
Has the USOPC asked? Conducted a survey? If so, let’s make that survey public.
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Here’s the acid test:
The mascots?
Let’s ask Ms. Deal and Ms. Hirshland if they would volunteer to be in the prow of one of those boats, Titanic-style.
Unless each or both would be willing to put their lives on the line, why should any single American athlete?
Real talk: right after the Israelis, the next target is the U.S. team.
We are dealing with fundamentalist Islamic terrorism. Political correctness, some perceived squeamishness about the words at issue, the threat, must not get in the way of the priority and the mission – keeping people safe.
For that matter, along with Ms. Deal and Ms. Hirshland:
Put the IOC president, the IOC executive board, the IOC members and the many assorted dignitaries in the boats.
Put the heads of state in the boats.
For clarity: on the Israeli and American boats.
Let them sail down the river, open to whatever menace there might – or not – be.
By the way, just like the athletes: no bullet-proof vest, no armor.
If they aren’t willing – if they aren’t willing to declare very publicly that they are willing – why should we ask any athlete from anywhere to be on that river?
The stadium is a far more controllable space. The river is the very essence of uncontrollable.
As one of my best former graduate students said, haven’t they always done it at a stadium – why a river? So strange, she said. You want to show off the beauty of Paris but risk safety? Seems, she said, like a no-brainer to move it.
This is why Plan C.
Like, now. This is real time.