Tag: Paris Olympics

Bars and cafes in the French capital will be allowed to stay open round-the-clock for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Paris Olympics, a city decree  said.

The decision “is linked to a range of free festivities organised by the city, away from the sports venues” and is justified “by the exceptional nature of the opening and closing ceremonies,” the ruling from the city prefect says.

It means bars will be able to stay open all night on July 26, when the Olympics are set to open with a boat parade on the river Seine, as well as the closing ceremony on August 11.

The same exception to licensing rules will be made for the opening of the Paralympic Games on August 28 and the closing ceremony on September 8.

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The decree states that bar owners “remain in these exceptional circumstances the guarantors of public order inside their establishments.”

The City of Light has around 15,000 bars, many of which close during the month of August for the summer holidays in normal years.

Several residents’ associations, including “Droit au Sommeil” (The Right to Sleep), have been critical of moves by Paris authorities to extend licensing hours for temporary outdoor eating and drinking areas during the Games.

Those establishments will be able to serve until midnight, instead of 10pm as usual.

Nigeria’S 100m hurdles world record holder Tobi Amusan has been cleared to run in the Paris Olympics after the sport’s top court on Friday dismissed appeals against the decision to clear her of a doping offense.

Amusan, 27, was charged in July 2023 with missing three anti-doping tests in 12 months but was cleared of the offense by the Disciplinary Tribunal of the sport’s governing body, World Athletics.

However, World Athletics and the World Anti-Doping Agency appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport against that decision.

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CAS said in a statement that its panel “unanimously acknowledged that the athlete committed two filing failures but did not confirm the existence of a missed test, alleged by WA and WADA, which would have been the third Whereabouts Failure committed within 12 months.”

Amusan set the world record of 12.12 seconds in the world championships in Eugene, Oregon, in July 2022 and went on to win the title.

She finished sixth in the world championships in Budapest last year.

World Athletics’ anti-doping rules say any athlete failing to declare their whereabouts for a doping test on three occasions over 12 months is ineligible to compete for two years.

The Paris Olympics this year are expected to cost the state between 3-5 billion euros ($3.2-5.4 billion), the French national auditor said as new figures revealed the country’s widening debt levels.

 “We still don’t know the cost of the Olympics,” Pierre Moscovici, the head of the auditing body, told France Inter radio yesterday. “These games will cost between three, four or five billion euros.”

Moscovici had estimated in January last year that the ultimate cost to taxpayers would be “around three billion euros”, which represented an increase from government budget estimates at the time of 2.44 billion euros.

The bill for every Olympics often expands in the latter stages of preparations as unbudgeted costs appear or extra funds are needed to accelerate unfinished building work.

Under the threat of strikes, the French government is currently negotiating one-off bonuses for public sector staff who will work during the Games, with pay-offs to the police alone set to cost up to 500 million euros.

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The overall cost for the Paris Games, including private and public money, was most recently estimated at around nine billion euros, up from a budgeted 6.6 billion euros when the city was selected in 2017.

Making cost comparisons between Games is difficult because of a lack of transparency with figures and the complexity of comparing investments across countries.

But a 2020 study by academics at the University of Oxford concluded that every summer Games since 1960 had gone over budget, with the average sports-related costs ending up between two and three times (172 percent) the original estimate.

The most notorious over-spends occurred in Montreal in 1976 and Rio de Janiero in 2016, where both cities were left nearly bankrupt and mired in debt, as well as Athens in 2004 which contributed to the country’s debt and financial crisis.

Paris organisers had promised “sober” Games, using existing sports infrastructure for 95 percent of their needs to keep new construction and costs down.

France’s budget deficit leapt to 5.5 percent of gross domestic product last year, according to figures published on Tuesday, piling pressure on President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist government to find cost-cuts and savings.

France’s public sector debt now stands at 110.6 percent of GDP, making the country the third-most indebted country in the Eurozone, outperforming only laggards Greece and Italy.