“Handball à droite, volleyball à gauche.” For 16 days the volunteer directing crowds outside the South Paris Arena was the soundtrack to my waking hours, his megaphoned voice echoing round the Place de la Porte de Versailles and into my seventh‑floor hotel room 150 metres away across the square.
He would start at 8am. An hour earlier the convoy of gendarme trucks would have arrived, each van feeling the need to alert the entire 15th arrondissement to its arrival with a blast of its siren. They would set up their roadblocks, buy their croissants and spend the day flexing their muscles to passing Parisiens.
La Police Nationale would show up around the same time and before long the tooled-up squaddies would be pacing up and down outside the venue entrances, too. Cafes did a roaring trade all day long catering to a constant stream of arriving and departing handball and volleyball fans, clad in national colours, draped in flags, singing songs.
By mid-afternoon Monsieur le Megaphone was usually leading the crowds in a rendition of Joe Dassin’s Les Champs-Élysées and after 9pm everybody seemed pissed. It was all utterly wonderful.
Today, however, is different. This is Monday, Day +1 of the Games, the morning after the closing ceremony. The megaphone has fallen silent. The 7am gendarme convoy has been replaced by a 7am contractors’ lorry. A gaggle of workers clad in bright orange hi-viz vests emerge and start tidying away barriers. The roadblocks are gone. The tram stop has reopened.
Is this what normal life in this corner of south-west Paris almost resembles? The Games livery is still draped over every public space, the flags still flutter, but the Olympic visitors have vanished. Never mind the horror movie 28 Days Later – this is 28 Hours Later, and I am an Olympic zombie.
This isn’t the reality, of course. Paris never emptied itself of its inhabitants. The French capital has a population of 2.1 million. Life goes on. It’s just they haven’t spent the past two weeks dancing and singing their way down the street clad head to toe in orange after watching the Netherlands dish out a spanking in the volleyball.
Corinne Menegaux, director of the tourist office, chicly renamed Paris je t’aime, gave Le Monde the facts and figures to back this up. She said that, for the first week of the Olympics, the Paris region recorded the same number of inhabitants as during the equivalent period in 2023. Interestingly, there was a modest but unexpected 3% increase within the capital itself.
Then there were the visitors, and lots of them – 2.4 million in fact from outside the Paris region from 25 July to 2 August, of which 73% were French, half of them coming just for the day. The remaining 27% of visitors were international, up 14% on last year. So Paris stayed populated, and it was just as much day-trippers from la France profonde as noisy foreign fans who made the place so vibrant and colourful.
But now here we are, hangover day for those of us who stayed the night, left to rub along politely with the party hosts and help clear up the plates and glasses, wondering how to get the wine stain out of the carpet and when it would be OK to leave.
I go for a walk before I pack my bags for my Tuesday Eurostar home and drop into a regular local haunt. Two days before the opening ceremony, I had asked the chef-owner of the restaurant 750g la Table what he thought about the Games. His answers have stuck in my mind the whole time. “Les Jeux Olympiques?!” he had exclaimed. “They’re a sack of shit. It’s a disaster. My takings are down 35%. Businesses are closing. Tourists don’t visit.”
So today I ask him what he thinks now the show is over. “Ah, je me suis trompé!” he says, smiling. “I was wrong.” The Guardian’s Paris correspondent, Angelique Chrisafis, says this is quite a common thing to hear from people in the city right now.
“It was incroyable, for the city and for my business. I was wrong about it all. As you can see, today we are not busy. Sit wherever you like. All we do now is rest and clean.”
We shake hands and I ask him what happens now for him and Paris. “Maintenant? Je vais faire une sieste,” he says. He mimes falling asleep, laughs, and heads off to the back room for a nap.