The Games security, an eternal challenge

In Olympic mode, a year and a half is nothing. That’s what separates us from a new Feast of the Rings. The unprecedented three-year cycle that was forced by the pandemic will be formally closed on July 26 of next year when one of the many mega-stars of French sports lights the flask with the sacred fire. And at this point, while tens of thousands of athletes from all over the planet dream of earning a bed in the Parisian Olympic Village, the French capital is working piecework on the way to the biggest challenge of these days: ensuring safety in such a tourist area on the way to the first Olympic Games open to the public since Rio 2016 and after the destruction caused by COVID 19.

Any city with the beauty, magnitude and appeal of Paris experiences a level of security stress every day of its existence. But since the games have been the games and, especially, since the Munich Massacre of 1972, saturation in control issues represents the most sensitive issue, skills on the sidelines.

You don’t have to travel too far to have a finished idea of what the security service entails for a meeting attended by athletes, leaders, officials, fans and even leaders from more countries than the UN is the nucleus.

Few cities compete in the battle for charm and tourist preference as much as Paris and London.

A few days before the start of the 2012 games, a shock of concern invaded the organizing committee of those wonderful games.

Personally, staying at Icona Point, a building from which you could see the Olympic Stadium and the Orbit itself very close, several mornings I crossed groups of employees hired by the G4S, a private security service that had to ensure that everything worked under control at each venue of the competitions. On one of those occasions, I was struck by an argument between someone who seemed to be in charge of a group and a couple of uniformed personnel. None of them spoke English. Soon after, it became known that, hours before Paul McCartney shocked the whole world with his Hey Jude of the opening ceremony, the Organizing Committee had decided to place British Army soldiers in each sensitive post, among whom there were several recently returnees from bases in different sensitive points of Asian territory, and to limit the presence of what, at that time, was the most important private security company in the world. Local media highlighted that the flaws detected ranged from the impossibility of identifying certain prohibited items in areas of competence to personnel with criminal records or foreigners without permission to work in the country.

What, at first, seemed like a very high risk ended up being another success for that organization: no one reported problems in terms of security and, personally, I attest that the controls on the various press spaces, including the IBC, were effective, gentle and especially agile.

Four years later, in the months leading up to the Rio Games, one of the most influential members of the organizing committee confessed to me his conviction that there is no such thing as the perfect team or organization. “That never happens. The merit of the best teams is that they solve the problem quickly, recognize the error, turn the tables and move on”.

That’s what London was all about. That’s what Rio was all about. That was Tokyo’s great legacy. And that will be the great challenge of what, we imagine and desire, will be Paris 2024.