The 2024 Olympic opening ceremony in Paris will be scaled back in terms of capacity and ticketing amid security concerns in the city.
French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said Tuesday that 104,000 spectators of the audacious, open-air event — which is expected to feature a floating parade on the Seine River — will be paying ticket holders along the lower riverbanks, with another 222,000 spectators on the upper banks watching for free, according to multiple reports.
However, the free tickets will not be available to the general public, and will instead be invitation-only.
“To manage crowd movement, we can’t tell everyone to come,” Darmanin said, according to the Associated Press. “For security reasons that everyone understands, notably the terrorist threat of recent weeks, we are obliged to make it free but contained.”
Two Interior Ministry officials said that ceremony access will be allotted with quotas to select residents of towns or regions hosting Olympic events, local sports federations and others chosen by event organizers or their partners, per the AP.
Tourists won’t be able to sign up for the free tickets, but an Interior Ministry official told the AP that the sports federations could invite foreign visitors as part of their quotas. The report also said that invited spectators will have to undergo security checks and will receive QR codes to get through security.
Organizers originally quoted the event as hosting 600,000 spectators, but Darmanin said earlier this year it would be about half that size, per reports. In another shift leading up to the Games and after pushback from local booksellers, a longtime fixture along the river, French President Emmanuel Macron canceled plans to move their stands in preparation for the opening ceremony.
Darmanin did not cite a specific security threat against the event, but said there are multiple potential threats, including those from Islamic extremist groups, violent environmental activists, far-right groups and cyberattacks from Russia or other adversaries, according to the AP.
In January, Paris organizers said there would be roughly 2,000 private security guards in the seating venues closest to the river and about 45,000 security forces on the outer perimeter — 15 times the number of Paris police normally deployed for the entire Paris historical district.
At the time, Lambis Konstantinidis, director of planning and coordination for the Paris Games and a veteran of multiple Olympic organizing efforts, also said that contingency plans, for security or other concerns, were focused on “having the ceremony on the river Seine” rather than potentially moving the ceremony to a more traditional setting, like a stadium.
French security experts previously raised doubts about securing the banks of the Seine, and in December, Macron said there was “obviously a Plan B, a Plan C” in the face of elevated security risks.
“For us to come out and make this sort of bold commitment, we had a significant reassurance from the authorities that (securing an on-river opening ceremony) was feasible,” Konstantinidis previously said. “It requires means, it requires investment, but what the President said — we’re already doing.
“We have to have a contingency plan, but we need to have one anyway for a number of reasons that are not all security-related. … It’s not about having it at the river Seine or in the stadium or someone else, but, could it look different?”
The opening ceremony is slated to take place July 26 with the floating parade along the Seine River featuring a 3.7-mile journey in which delegations from 200 countries will board 100 boats for a 45-minute ride that begins near the national library, winds past the Cathedral of Notre Dame and the Louvre, passes by all of Paris’ famous centrally located gardens and ends at the Eiffel Tower.
It will be the first Summer Olympics to open outside a stadium.
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(Photo: Dimitar Dilkoff / AFP)