Passengers waiting for their train departures at the Gare Montparnasse train station in Paris on Friday.Credit…David Ramos/Getty Images
Olympics Live Updates: Arson Attack Incites Travel Chaos Ahead of Opening Ceremony
[source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/world/olympics-paris-attack-opening-ceremony]
At least three high-speed links to Paris were disrupted, causing widespread delays affecting about 800,000 travelers, the French national rail company said.
Aurelien BreedenJohn Yoon and Andrew Das
Andrew Das and Aurelien Breeden reported from Paris.
Coordinated arson attacks disrupted service on three high-speed train lines in France on Friday, causing travel chaos across the nation on the day of the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. Train service is expected to be affected through the weekend, interrupting plans for more than a million people, including French vacationers, Olympic athletes and tourists.
The fires, which were set in pipes carrying cables and have been described as “criminal,” were all detected around 4 a.m., according to Patrice Vergriete, France’s transportation minister. The disruptions rippled beyond Paris, with Eurostar, an international rail service, saying it would divert trains from the city.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks. French officials suggested that the fires had been set to disrupt the Olympics.
The opening ceremony is expected to proceed Friday night under heightened security, which may complicate travel plans for visitors heading to Paris, even those using modes of transport not directly affected by the attacks.
The mood was already tense in Paris, where security has been tightening for weeks ahead of the Games. Tens of thousands of police officers, joined by counterterrorism units and the military, have been deployed across the city to guard Olympic venues, tourist sites, train stations and street corners.
Weeks ago, the authorities cordoned off a section of the Seine on both banks to protect the thousands of athletes who will take part in the ceremony in a huge flotilla of boats, as well as the hundreds of thousands of fans who will go to see it.
Here’s what else to know:
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Amélie Oudéa-Castera, France’s minister for sports and the Olympics, said the authorities were still evaluating whether athletes’ transportation would be affected over the weekend.
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There were severe disruptions on the three lines where fires had been set — the Atlantic, Northern and Eastern lines — with many trains canceled, the railway company, S.N.C.F., said in a statement. It advised travelers to postpone their trips if possible.
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Eurostar said in a statement that all of its high-speed trains going to and from Paris were being diverted, extending travel times by about 90 minutes. Several trains have been canceled.
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The fires were set in pipes carrying cables used for signaling, Jean-Pierre Farandou, the chief executive of S.N.C.F., told reporters. One of the fires was set around Arras, a town about 100 miles north of Paris, on the high-speed line between the capital and Lille, according to the railway company. A second was set in Courtalain, a town about 90 miles southwest of Paris, on the lines connecting Tours and Le Mans to Paris, it said. The company said that another attack had been thwarted on the line that connects Paris to southeastern France.
Reporting from Paris
Gérald Darmanin, France’s interior minister, said at a meeting about Olympics security that, setting aside the arson attacks, “things were perfectly positive” in Paris, where the authorities had not identified “any particular problem” ahead of the opening ceremony. “All that is left is to hope for good weather,” he quipped.
Reporting from Paris
Jean-Pierre Farandou, the president of the S.N.C.F., told reporters that the arsonists appeared to have strategically targeted areas right before tracks split off in two different directions, maximizing the amount of chaos. “The locations were chosen specifically to have more serious consequences, since a single fire cuts off traffic on two branches of the network,” Farandou said.
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A spokesman for the Paris 2024 Olympics told me there were no plans to delay the opening ceremony and insisted everything was going ahead as planned.
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Reporting from Paris
Some high-speed trains are running again on Friday, the S.N.C.F. said in the early afternoon. “Repairs are continuing, but traffic will remain disrupted this weekend,” the company said in a statement.
Reporting from Paris
Workers have carried out “emergency repairs, enabling a partial and very gradual resumption of traffic” on the Atlantic line, which serves western and southwestern France, the company said.
Reporting from Paris
Franck Dubourdieu, who is in charge of the high-speed line that serves western and southwestern France, said that repair work would take at least a day. Automatic alarms quickly alerted the company to the fires, he told reporters near the Gare Montparnasse in Paris, adding that no one was injured. The arson targeted a signal station, making it impossible to dispatch trains.
Reporting from Paris
But Dubourdieu was confident that the disruptions would not overly disrupt the Games, despite train cancellations that will extend into the weekend. “I have no particular worries about being there for the athletes,” he said.
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Just hours before the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, France was rocked by a series of arson attacks on its rail network on Friday, stoking fears over security during the Games.
No one was killed or reported injured, but the damage to France’s high-speed train lines caused major delays as thousands of local and international travelers were expected to converge on Paris for the ceremony and the Games. The arson attacks, which authorities have described as “criminal,” come amid heightened security concerns, when France is the center of a global spectacle.
With the awful mess our countries are in, nobody cares about the Olympics anymore. The Zionist elite will probably do a terrorist attack so they can turn France into a fully communist, anti-white police state.
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I’ve never been big on sports, and I find it primitive compared to the arts or designing and sculpting.
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We used to exercise in the natural environment until we destroyed most of it and overpopulated our world. The suburbs were created by a jew as part of globalism.
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We should look up to European inventors, explorers, pioneers, conquerors, artists, designers, not scumbag celebrities such as sports players, singers and actors.
I sort of agree, especially since jews totally took over professional sports, brought in other races and nationalities, and it became all about the money.
The excellent movie “Jerry Maguire” with Tom Cruise, Renée Zellweger, and Cuba Gooding Jr sure shows it, and the owners and sports agents are depicted as the hook-nosed jews they are, and you pick up on the greed and dishonesty in the National Football League, jew-ridden as it is. (And all Americans remember with nausea the “take-the-knee white-guilt thing at the beginning of each football game.)
It is amazing to me how taxpayers even PAY hundreds of millions of dollars to build these gigantic stadiums where they will enter to worship negroes who are getting paid $12 million a year or more as grown men to play with a ball while they can barely pay their bills, and other negroes are raping, robbing, and even killing them.
Even worse when you realize that these stadiums are dual-use — being also transit camps for dissidents!
On the other hand, the Ancient Greeks, who basically founded our civilization, were big into athletics, and every Greek citizen was an athlete. This is also how the Greeks defeated the Persians time and again: not just brains but also brawn.
The goddess Nike (“Victory”) crowns a winning athlete
Sports is also the only way (except for a lucky lottery ticket) that the average Joe can become a millionaire.
And great athletes succeed because of a strong character. They are disciplined while training, they hone their positive attitude, and they suffer injuries, yet move forward.
If we just take the jews out of the equation, sports can be a good thing. 🙂
In the 1936 Olympics, Germany beat the previous nation winner, the USA. The movie “Olympia” by Leni Riefenstahl shows sports at their most noble.
“Olympia — Festival of Beauty” is a 1938 German documentary film written, directed and produced by Leni Riefenstahl, documenting the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, Germany. Riefenstahl was a film-making genius. There is so much innovative camerawork in this movie, it’s hard to list them all. Just her use of tracking shots (pre Steadicam!) alone is amazing, plus the lighting, the circular panningm the high and low angles. It’s like a master class in cinema.
The film was released in two parts: Olympia 1. Teil — Fest der Völker (Festival of Nations) and Olympia 2. Teil — Fest der Schönheit (Festival of Beauty). It was the first documentary feature film of the Olympic Games ever made. Many advanced motion picture techniques, which later became industry standards but which were groundbreaking at the time, were employed —including unusual camera angles, smash cuts, extreme close-ups, placing tracking shot rails within the bleachers, and the like. The techniques employed are almost universally admired, but the film is controversial due to its political context. Nevertheless, the film appears on many lists of the greatest films of all time, including Time magazine’s “All-Time 100 Movies.”
Olympia set the precedent for future films documenting and glorifying the Olympic Games, particularly the Summer Games. The 1936 Summer Olympics torch relay was devised by the German sports official Dr. Carl Diem for these Olympic Games in Berlin. Riefenstahl later staged the torch relay for this film, with competitive events of the Games.