Paris ready to deliver successful Olympic Games: Organising committee president

PARIS : Transport and security are the main two challenges Paris 2024 will face at this year's Olympics, and organising committee president Tony Estanguet is confident everything will go smoothly when the Games start on Jul 26.

The extravaganza will kick off with a dazzling opening ceremony on and along the River Seine, with up to 500,000 spectators expected to attend the athletes' parade.

Paris is a dense, compact city with most of the sporting venues within a 30-minute commute from the Olympic village.

Security is a top priority and organisers and the government will need to liaise to make it work.

"We've contracted 70 per cent of our needs in terms of private security at the end of 2023," Estanguet told Reuters.

"We have a last series of tenders that are ongoing to cover the remaining 30 per cent in the first trimester, which will give us visibility and we'll take it from there to see how we can develop private and public security to make the Games safe."

Last year Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo said the transportation network was "not ready" to cope with the demands of the Olympics.

Sources told Reuters she was not happy with the lack of cooperation from the regional authorities, who manage the Paris Metro.

Estanguet, however, believes operations will go smoothly thanks to better staffing and increased number of trains during a usually calm period.

"We have a very precise forecast of what we will need in terms of transport and security day-by-day," he said, flagging up that the Games were within budget.

France is acutely aware how the 2022 Champions League final, hastily arranged in Paris after being moved to France from St Petersburg following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, turned into a fiasco and Estanguet said lessons had been