I t was on Marseille’s Corniche John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the coastal road that slings around France’s second city, that Gérald Darmanin metaphorically staged his own medal ceremony. A peculiar choice of location for this particular moment of national back-slapping given the Kennedy history but France’s interior minister could be excused for getting a little giddy. “It all started here, with the arrival of the Olympic flame in Marseille,” Darmanin told a lineup of gendarmes.
“It’s a beautiful gold medal for the security forces.” This was going to be the Conflict Games, staged at a time of unnerving global insecurity, with Russia said to be out to disrupt it having been prohibited from involvement, along with Belarus, as a result of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine . It was being played out to the backdrop of a potential all-out regional war in the Middle East that ushered up memories of the 1972 Munich Olympics, when Palestinian militants infiltrated the Olympic village, killing 11 members of the Israeli team .
A certain sense of foreboding had not been assuaged by the excitable warnings from Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, who publicly spoke of intelligence of a plot by “Iranian terrorist proxies and other terrorist organisations who aim to carry out attacks against members of the Israeli delegation and Israeli tourists during the Olympics”. It had looked a brave, even foolhardy decision then, to turn over the crown jewels of Paris’s lo.