France has backup plans to move the opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympic Games from the Seine if there is a serious risk of a terrorist attack, Emmanuel Macron has said.
Speaking in a television interview on Monday, the French president said organisers “could and would” continue to plan for a “world first” opening ceremony for 26 July, when more than 300,000 people are expected to watch a flotilla of boats carrying national teams down the river.
However, plans for the spectacle were dependent on security assessments, he added. “If we think there are risks, depending on our analysis of the context, we have fallback scenarios,” Macron said. “There are plans B and C and we are preparing them in parallel.”
In the interview, aired 100 days before the action begins, Macron said the alternatives were a reduced ceremony at Trocadéro, an area facing the Eiffel Tower in the 16th arrondissement, or in the Stade de France north of the city.
“We’ll be analysing the situation in real time and preparing a ceremony that would be limited to Trocadéro, where we wouldn’t use the whole of the Seine, or even a ceremony that would bring the public to the Stade de France, which is what has been done traditionally,” Macron said.
He added: “What the terrorists want is to prevent us from dreaming, and that’s their greatest victory.”
A security perimeter and red zone is to be set up eight days before the opening ceremony.
“There are always risks in life, but we’re using all our means. We’ve planned ahead, we’ve set up a very wide [security] perimeter and we’re going to screen people going in and out and restrict traffic.
“If there’s one place your son will be safe it’s there,” Macron assured one viewer worried about her son attending the opening ceremony.
Macron’s admission comes after French Olympic officials’ repeated insistence that there was no plan B for the opening ceremony.
France has been on maximum security alert since the attack on a Moscow concert hall last month.
Macron said 30,000 police and gendarmes would be on duty every day during the Games, backed up by 20,000 private security staff. Soldiers would also be mobilised in a “watching mode” the same way as for periods of heightened security in a patrolling, rather than intervention, role.
“We will continue to live and show that we are capable of holding major events,” he added. VIP tickets for the best seats from which to watch the opening ceremony are selling for €2,700 (£2,300).
The interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, told Le Parisien newspaper last week: “To date, we have no clear terrorist threat to the organisation of the Olympic and Paralympic Games so there is no question of calling the organisation [of the opening ceremony] into question.”
Darmanin said if there was a clear and imminent threat any decision to change venues would be taken by the president.
Asked if the Malian-born French raised singer Aya Nakamura, 28, France’s biggest pop star, would be taking part in the ceremonies, a possibility that prompted rightwing racist abuse now being investigated by the Paris prosecutor when it was raised last month, Macron said he hoped so.
“The reaction shocked me … it was really racist,” he said. “I hope she will be chosen, and will accept if she wants to participate,” he said, adding: “She has her place in a ceremony opening or closing, if she takes part with other artists it’s a good thing because these ceremonies resemble us, she is part of French culture, French music …”