Sunday, August 4th
Gare de Lyon to metro station Bibliothèque Francois Mitterand. Yellow RER C train to St Quentin Yveslines (SQY). Bus to Le Golf Nationale. Two hours. Paris Olympics, the ‘food-on-the-run’ games.
Final round galleries 20, 30, 40 deep adore the French golfers, the Irish almost as much. On the first tee, a wide-eyed Shane Lowry gazes up and around. A sea of humanity festooned with GAA tops. Kerry, Roscommon and the green of Castlergar, Galway, a pharmacy sponsor’s name on the front. Chicken goujons, chips and coke in 80 degrees for €18. Visa only.
Shane doesn’t get going. But Rory does. His final round from the turn can be summed up in a 17 syllable Haiku. ‘Birdie, birdie, birdie, birdie, birdie, water grave, wedge screwed me up.’ A capricious bastard of a game.
“I mean I’d a wedge in my hand at 15. Birdie that and get to 18 under and tied for the lead. Absolutely any medal was possible at that point,” he says.
Shane has already departed. A tournament in the US next week.
“I’ve to pick the kids up in Dublin and go to America,” he says.
SQY to Montparnasse and on to Chatelet. One stop to Gare de Lyon. One demi carafe. Rouge.
Monday, August 5th
Working outside. Laptop in the shade, body in the sun. A waitress sweetly begins to pull over an umbrella. A mournful wail stops her dead. She can’t even begin to understand July weather in Dún Laoghaire.
More humanity here but of a different kind. Five are asleep by the station doors, a few more are smoking weed and a homeless man asks for the chips on the plate. He gets them. The waitress stares across with that badly let down look. Chastened.
Disadvantaged mingle with armed Police Nationale around the mini-Olympic playground with stalls and 0.0% beer. For that some of a certain age have zero tolerance.
At Trocadero the parade of champions is taking place. Novak Djokovic walks the same ground as Mona McSharry and Rhys McClenaghan and for a moment the Olympics feels like a great leveller. Up in Stade de France, the Rugby Sevens seem to have taken place two lifetimes ago.
There is heartbreak and disappointment on the track. That’s the theme of every Olympic Games. For every 800m swimming and lightweight rowing gold and every Duplantis pole vault world record there are 100 crushed souls.
We take the RER straight into Chatelet. One stop to Gare de Lyon. Le Terminus still open, another deadline made.
Tuesday, August 6th
Gare de Lyon to Chatelet. A three-stop bump to Odeon and all the way to Porte D’Auteuil. This is familiar. The Rugby World Cup last year bivouacked here.
Covering the tennis 20 years ago a promising young kid with cut off sleeves called Rafa was strafing the courts in the junior tournament. Today it is boxing. The ubiquitous Roland Garros. Philippe-Chatrier centre court has become Kellie Harrington’s livingroom.
She is last on, the only final on a seven-fight card. London 2012 Irish boxing coach Billy Walsh has a US fighter Omari Jones in the first bout. Billy’s Wexford neighbour and former Irish coach Eddie Bolger, now with Germany, has Raman Tiafack in the 92kg semi-final. Ireland has the ursine, Georgia-born Zaur Antia in its corner and team high performance director Tricia Heberle is Australian. Immigrants earning opportunity and respect.
Gold! They hug in a circle, I guesstimate on the deuce court. Kellie sings Grace with fans. We sit around the mixed zone waiting for the double gold medallist. Outside an occasional cheer breaks the silence. Radiant in an Irish trackie she talks retirement and normal life.
Outside at 2.35am, this is what a suburban red light district looks like. Uber.
Wednesday, August 7th
To Bourget out past Stade de France. One stop to Chatelet and the RER B line chugs beyond the stadium. Miss the Bourget stop and the north eastern suburb of Drancy is next.
Holocaust Encyclopedia: “Beginning in summer 1942, Drancy became the major transit camp for the deportations of Jews from France. Until July 1943, French police staffed the camp under the overall control of the German Security Police and SD. Approximately 70,000 prisoners passed through Drancy between August 1941 and August 1944.”
Exit Bourget and walk 800m say the notes. Note to self: Treble every number.
Here is the Site d’escalade Bourget and towering up five stories is the Olympic climbing wall. Harnessed, the women of the Speed Climbing final glide vertically upwards like Gary Oldman did on his castle walls in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula. Other worldly and mildly creepy, humans racing up a wall on four legs. Prisoners used to bet on such outcomes with flies.
Passing Stade de France. Adeleke is running and we hear, feel, imagine the low moan of a collapsing Olympic Games.
Thursday, August 8th
No travel. Blissful morning and the weather app shows a bright orange ball with 27 beside it.
Leona Maguire and Stephanie Meadow golfing at Le Golf Nationale. Leona starts with a six on the first, yearns for a happy ending but cards eight for the 9th. There’s no way back.
Sun-kissed Gare de Lyon looking like a palace. We know if you go in you may not emerge for two hours. So, we cower away like, well, Gary Oldman in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula when a sunbeam strikes.
Praise the gods it has not rained for a while and the Parisian drains will not enter the River Seine in gastroenteritis belly loads. Daniel Wiffen’s final swim is tomorrow. E.coli shall have no dominion. The women swimmers today hug the edges around Pont Alexandre III. We deduce/reason/guess, it’s to avoid a midstream current. A $1.5 billion Seine clean up project and what the city got back for it is “let’s hope it doesn’t rain”.
Dinner at Quai 33. An older waiter apologises to the table as he instructs a younger employee how to correctly take a cork from a wine bottle. Spectating again. An out of context end to the end of the day.
Friday, August 9th
A straight slingshot to Franklin D Roosevelt. The Grand Palais closed its doors in 2021 for a refurb and opened the Nave and the galleries for Paris 2024. We walk among the scaffold and 124-year-old interior brick walls to an atrium. Enormous green painted cast iron arches. A glass roof 45m above.
Fabric diffuses the light falling on the most stunning arena imaginable. Fencing and Taekwondo marinating in grandeur. Moving down a spiral stairway we cross to Pont Alexandre III. The nearby Eiffel Tower looks over tiny splashes in the distance like white birds on the surface. The Seine water changes colour. Brown mostly and flashes of bottle green.
Daniel Wiffen explains to television the average swimming pool has as much E.coli. He continues along the mixed zone, a green racing cap stretched over his head. “Right, now I am going to go and party for three days,” he says. Great energy after a 10k swim.
Wiffen’s disposition is the final leg, his Olympics are over. His mood is triumph. Not yet 11am we drift back through the blinding beauty of the Grand Palais towards the Champs-Elysées and walk across Place de la Concorde.
Palais Royal Musee du Louvre to Gare de Lyon, five stops.
