A Games on spectacular scale, but is Paris ready to party?

Show of epic ambition awaits in French capital

- Malik Ouzia Qa

IT IS one of the curiosities of Paris that a city among the planet’s most visited by tourists can feel quite so impenetrable to outsiders, full of codes to crack and faux pas’ to be swerved.

“You can’t walk into a restaurant demanding dinner at 6pm while wearing orange shorts and an Ohio State sweatshirt,” author Simon Kuper writes in his book Impossible City, a memoir of his, at times, painfully slow infiltration of Parisian life as resident across two decades. “There is a right way to do everything in Paris, and it was probably decided before you were born.”

Not then, at first glance, a host with natural inclination to throw arms open to the world. The Olympics, though, can do funny things to people and mood, as Londoners have spent the past dozen years attesting in tones of mournful reminisce, and Paris has been waiting a full century for the Games of 1900 and 1924 to make their hat-trick return.

That gap is not for want of trying: a long courtship punctuated by failed bids, and after the shock, stinging defeat to London in the race for 2012, appetite for another tilt was not widespread. Even now, on the eve of the Games, as some Parisians prepare to fall wilfully head over heels, others remain of the “never-liked-him-anyway” mind.