Olympics 2024 | The Olympic flame melts Parisian cool

Paris: Félix Lebrun has the crowd eating out of the palm of his hand. He raises his arms. They cheer. He pumps his fists. They roar. He struts around the sold-out arena, prowling the floor, basking in the noise and the adulation.

In that moment, that first flush of victory, Lebrun is not a bespectacled 17-year-old table tennis player from Montpellier. For everyone present — up to and including French former soccer hero Zinedine Zidane — he is a rock star.

This sort of thing has been happening a lot in Paris over the last week. At the fencing competition, held in the lavish surrounds of the Grand Palais, fans waving tricolors have produced enough noise to echo down the Champs-Élysées. The Stade de France shook when France’s men won gold in rugby sevens.

Each of Léon Marchand’s triumphs at the swimming pool has been greeted by unrestrained delirium, not just inside the arena at La Défense but across the city. The sound from the stadium at Invalides, home to archery, has been loud enough to wake Napoleon.

The test, for these Olympics, was always going to be whether Paris — a place that prizes chic and wears its aloofness as an impeccably accessorized badge of honor — would give itself over to the carnival spirit of the Games.

The answer, it turns out, is yes. Paris has, for the last week, completely lost its cool.

This may well have come as a surprise to the Parisians themselves. The weeks and months preceding the Games were buffeted by a steady torrent of complaints and anxieties and apparently inevitable catastrophes rearing up on the horizon.

There was, in general, so little anticipation for the Games that the newspaper Libération was advising “grumpy” Parisians to “breathe in and breathe out deeply.”

David Gaud, reading a book on the banks of the Seine during a lunch break, put the sentiment in terms so Parisian it is impossible to imagine them being delivered without a dismissive shrug. “Did the city need this? Maybe not,” he said. “But now Paris has committed itself. It has to happen. That’s it, so that all of the people who come from all over the world are happy.”

That air of grudging fatalism and affected disinterest evaporated almost as soon as Teddy Riner and Marie-José Perec lit the flame that lifted the Olympic cauldron from the grounds of the Tuileries. The rain that had doused the opening ceremony had ceased by then, and Paris felt like a city en fête.

“A lot of the criticism beforehand was just the French being French,” said Anne Brion, who is French and therefore allowed to say what the rest of the world only thinks. “What happened four weeks ago — with the election and everything that came afterward — was a real shame. People wanted a distraction. They wanted to forget about it for a while.”

They have, it is fair to say, embraced their opportunity. The Olympics have brought a great influx of visitors from across the globe: the streets around the venues, scattered across the city, are full of Chinese flags and Brazilian soccer jerseys and endless variations on America’s stars and stripes.

More than anything, though, there are French tricolors. Tricolors being flourished from temporary metal bleachers. Tricolors draped over shoulders. Tricolors fluttering from bikes and balconies. Tricolors painted on faces. Tricolors attached to hats.

Where no tricolors are available, alternatives have been sourced. The fashion capital of the world is awash in French soccer and rugby jerseys encompassing the last 40 years or so, Hawaiian shirts plastered with the face of the rugby star Antoine Dupont and, most popular of all, fuzzy cockerel hats.

“Some people were annoyed at the cost and the inconvenience,” said Richard Salandre, part of a baying crowd watching the fencing at the Grand Palais. “But now it is here, people are crazy for it.”

All of a sudden, athletes more accustomed to performing in more tranquil settings find themselves under the brightest of lights. “Normally the only people watching us are the girls who have lost before,” French fencer Auriane Mallo-Breton said. “There is not really a crowd. It is very quiet. Now we have this French power.”

The fact that France has started the Games so well has no doubt helped stir the Parisian soul. The country has not finished in the top five of the Olympics’ medal table since 1948, but at one point last Wednesday it briefly found itself ahead of the United States and China alone at the summit. Marchand had, as of Saturday morning, won more golds than Germany.

But while that might explain some of the attendances, the fervor is not isolated to the Olympic arenas.

More than a quarter-million people have made their way to La Villette, a park in the north of the city, to visit the Nations’ Park, where several countries have established entertainment centers. Huge crowds have braved baking temperatures to stroll the Champs-Élysées, decorated in Olympic regalia, and see the Olympic cauldron — which definitely does not contain a flame — for themselves.

“Paris is better now,” said Mathieu Grasland, a member of the self-styled Collectif Ultra Lebrun, a (presumably small) group of table tennis fans devoted to the greater glorification of both Félix and his brother, Alexis. “Maybe some people left, but the ones who are still here all like sport. The metro is empty. There is no traffic.”

To those who live in Paris, who had to deal with the strife and inconvenience of preparing for the Olympics, this is the payoff.

No matter where they are held, the Games always produce the strange sensation of turning residents into tourists in their own cities. Just as London did in 2012, say, Paris looks different than it might at the start of any other August, and as a result it feels different, too.

Branded blue advertising boards and various sponsor stalls have been strung along the Champs-Élysées. The temporary stands of stadiums peek out from behind the great golden cupola at Invalides. At night, from the Pont Neuf, the glowing bowl of the Olympic cauldron hangs over the Louvre, casting a new light on the city. The free tickets to witness it up close are quickly snapped up.

Not all of it adds quite so much to Paris’ beauty, of course, but the transformation has the effect of turning the familiar into the unfamiliar. For two weeks and a few days, Parisians can see Paris as the millions of visitors who come here every year do.

The locals seem to quite like it, too. Quentin Alaphilippe was forced (gently) to go and visit the cauldron by his mother last week. “She said it was a once-in-a-lifetime occasion,” he said. “I found it super cool. And it was packed.”

The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has already said that she would like to see the cauldron remain, to become part of the cityscape. She also has raised the possibility of retaining both the Olympic rings that adorn the Eiffel Tower and the statues of Simone de Beauvoir, Alice Milliat and eight other prominent French female icons that now rise, just a little eerily, from the Seine.

“These first days of the Games are a success on all fronts,” Gabriel Attal, the French prime minister, wrote on the social platform X this past week. “The French and the world not only follow them, they live them. They vibrate with the same emotions that run through our athletes and our champions. Each day that passes is a victory for all French people.”

Given how Attal’s July started — with an election that cost him his job — the shift in his mood is remarkable. But that is what the Olympics can do, even to a city as difficult to impress as Paris.

“There are a lot of people who I work with who were planning on going abroad,” Brion said as she prepared to go back into the table tennis arena, ready to cheer and stomp her feet again. “Now they are starting to say that maybe they will stick around.”