The motto for the 2024 Paris Olympics is ‘Games Wide Open’, which as far as irony goes is worthy of a gold medal.
These Games are shaping up to be anything but open, as the city’s famous bouquinistes have already discovered. More than 600 have been ordered to shut down their little green kiosks on the banks of the river Seine, where they have sold books to the public for 150 years. The Games’ organisers believe their presence during the opening ceremony – which will be staged on the river – is an impediment they can do without, and a fortnight ago four of the kiosks were removed in a trial run ahead of the real thing next July.
‘It’s like a tooth extraction,’ said Michel Bouetard, general secretary of the Cultural Association of Booksellers of Paris. ‘All this for a four-hour ceremony! The Olympic Games have achieved what the wars have not been able to do – make us disappear.’
There was another wartime allusion this week because of the Olympics, this one from Nathalie Goulet, a senator from Normandy, who was outraged to hear that Parisians must pre-register for a QR code if they wish to access traffic-restricted zones of the city during the Olympics, which run from July 26 to August 11.
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