When the French rugby sevens won gold with their national hero Antoine Dupont blasting through Fiji’s defence, and tens of thousands of fans in berets and cockerel outfits at the Stade de France began chanting Edith Piaf’s cabaret classic, Non, je ne regrette rien, it was clear that France was on a roll like never before.
No one had expected the sheer scale of togetherness and raw patriotic emotion in France in the first weekend of the Olympics. A nation which had for months been overwhelmingly sceptical about hosting the world’s biggest sporting event, got on board with the Games with such fervour that even “Toto” Dupont himself was surprised.
“I’ve rarely seen an atmosphere like this before, even though I’ve played matches in this stadium,” the famously humble Toulouse rugby star said at the Stade de France.
In the early hours of Sunday morning, the 27-year-old jumped from the stage at the Club France venue in La Villette wearing a pair of giant bunny ears and was passed gently and respectfully around above fans’ heads like a precious human talisman.
It seemed like the country, hit by political crisis and without a proper government, was now desperate to forget its troubles for two weeks and party day and night.
But sport was not enough, there had to be dancing. On the rugby pitch, Dupont and his teammates rushed back out on to the pitch with their gold medals round their necks to perform a choreography they had been taught by the Moulin Rouge cabaret stars during training – which has now become a cult classic routine, despite, or perhaps because of, their slightly haphazard steps. The crowd at the Stade de France went wild for the moves. “I’ve never in my life seen 80,000 people like that,” said Aaron Grandidier Nkanang, one of the winning sevens team.
France’s opening weekend was – however briefly – a masterclass in healing the national psyche, which Macron, as he grabbed Dupont’s face in his hands and said “well done”, is hoping can continue. First there was the rule-breaking, rain-soaked, disco extravaganza of the opening ceremony along the Seine. Then came a historic haul of French medals on day one.
Among the first four medals on Saturday was a judo silver for another budding national hero, Luka Mkheidze. The 28-year-old arrived in France from Georgia, via a difficult trip through Poland, with his family when he was 14 and spoke no French, turning up at a judo club with a polite letter translated into French asking for a chance to train. Years later, he was given French nationality. “You can transcend yourself on the day of the games,” he said.
In terms of political capital from sport, the mood has not been this electric since France’s 1998 World Cup win, inspired by Zinedine Zidane, when the diverse team was hailed as able to heal and reconcile a fractured society and end discrimination. But only four years after that football victory the far-right leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, made it to the second round of the presidential election. This time, weeks before the Olympics, his daughter Marine’s far-right National Rally party was prevented from forming a government by a massive surge of tactical voting in a snap parliament election.
Every gesture at the Olympics is now being clung to in France as a means of healing the recent election’s bitter rows over dual-nationals, identity and racism.
At the end of the opening ceremony, Marie-José Perec, the French former Olympic sprinter and gold-medal winner, lit the astonishing flying Olympic cauldron with another national treasure, the judo star, Teddy Riner. Both are from families from the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. Perec recounted the symbolism. “I asked Teddy, shall we hold hands?” she told Le Parisien. “I said to him: ‘Look at us: both black, both from Guadeloupe, a man and a woman, and we’re lighting the Olympic cauldron at the Paris Games.’ It’s something incredible, maybe even more intense than winning an Olympic gold.”
The French cheering at sporting fixtures was so thunderous that only two days into the action, many fans were hoarse. When the French swimming star Léon Marchand, known as the “aquatic missile”, appeared, the crowd went wild. Each time his head came up to breathe during breaststroke, the crowd gave a cheer in rhythm with his lungs. Marchand later secured the country’s third gold medal with a dominant swim in the men’s 400 individual medley to touch home first in four minutes and 2.95 seconds.
France’s cross-country mountain biking gold-medal winner, Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, was greeted by a blasting rendition of the national anthem as she crossed the finish line on Sunday. “It’s the fervour that has lifted us,” one of the French team’s cycling coaches said. He said that with all the cheering, athletes felt “indestructible”.
French fans’ ability to boo loader than any others has also been on display in the first few days. Every time an Argentinian team – football or rugby – entered the pitch there were loud heckles from French fans, angry at racist lyrics of a chant that some Argentinian footballers sang after they won the Copa América.
The first weekend’s medal haul for France included a silver in fencing for Auriane Mallo-Breton, and a bronze in judo for Shirine Boukli. The country is under pressure to make it to the top five of the medal table and this was seen as a good start.
Other national stars made their entrance at the Games on the first weekend, including “Wemby” – Victor Wembanyama, the 20-year-old basketball prodigy.
Even the glitches seemed to be resolving themselves. As soon as the men’s rugby sevens won gold, the rain they had been playing under instantly stopped and the sun came out. The nation’s train network, which was hit by coordinated sabotage attacks hours before the opening ceremony, was returning to normal.
Olympic merchandise shops in central Paris were doing slow business last week, but there were now queues around the block. Crowds were also gathering to marvel at the Olympic cauldron in the Tuileries gardens. After months of complaining, polling by the IOC found that 96% of French people thought the opening ceremony was a success.
All that was left was to keep the faith. As Thomas Jolly, the creator of the opening ceremony, said the day after the event: “We’re floating on a cloud of tolerance, recognition and incredible energy, a feeling of unity that is doing us all good.”
