A City of Light and Shadows Is Redrawn for the Olympics

There is a glorious folly to the Paris Olympics, the first in the city since 1924, as if France in its perennial revolutionary ardor took a century to ponder something unimaginable, the transformation of a great city into a stadium.

The heart of Paris has fallen silent in preparation for the opening ceremony on Friday, when a flotilla will usher thousands of athletes down the Seine, under the low-slung bridges where lovers like to linger. Not since the Covid-19 pandemic has the city been so still, or so constrained.

From the Pont d’Austerlitz in the east to the Pont Mirabeau in the west, roads are closed, newly built stands for spectators line the riverbanks, fences enclose sidewalks and residents need police-issued QR codes to reach their homes. The golden cherubs, nymphs and winged horses of the Pont Alexandre III, gaze out on metal bleachers and posses of police.

The Olympic project is almost unthinkable in its audacity, and a major security headache, but then the Eiffel Tower would never have risen above Paris in 1889 if the many naysayers had prevailed. As it went up for the Paris World Fair, Guy de Maupassant called the tower a “giant hideous skeleton” that had driven him out of Paris.

Now, between its first and second floors, five giant Olympic rings — in blue, yellow, black, green and red — adorn the tower. They glow at night over the Champ de Mars park, where the beach volleyball competition will be held. Nearby flows the Seine, beautified at a cost of about $1.5 billion and clean enough, it is said, for several Olympic events, including two 10-kilometer swims and the triathlon.

Swimming in the Seine was banned 101 years ago. All things come to an end. These Games, at a cost of about $4.75 billion, were conceived to be transformative in a lasting, environmentally conscious way. “We wanted a dash of revolution, something the French would look back at with pride,” Tony Estanguet, the head of the Paris Olympics committee, told me.