Finding enough security guards to meet the surveillance needs of the 40 Olympic sites is a challenge for the organizers. The Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Cojop) considers it necessary to have 17,000 agents per day, on average, for the duration of the Games, with a peak of 22,000 people.
For the moment, nothing allows us to say that this objective can be achieved. The Cojop unveiled, on Wednesday March 29, the result of the call for tenders it launched in April 2022, with players in the security sector. The results of the second call for tenders, dating from December 2022, are not yet known. A third will not be launched until April. It is therefore only at the end of 2023 that Paris 2024 will be able to have a detailed vision of its needs.
“We are on time”, assures Thomas Collomb, the security manager of the Cojop. But the result of the first call for tenders is hardly reassuring: 32 of the 136 lots offered could not be awarded, either for lack of candidates, or because the candidates did not provide sufficient guarantees. Only 28 providers were selected. Among these companies, mostly medium-sized French SMEs, a third are event specialists, the others being generalist security players.
The more the months pass, the more the scenario of recourse to the army looms. To the point of causing serious concern within the staffs. Working in close collaboration with all of the Games’ security players, they fear a disaster scenario, similar to that of the Olympic Games (OG) in London, in 2012. To the point of deeming it necessary to make it known.
“We fear that private security is not there. It remains to be seen whether this failure will be massive or partial, summarizes a military source, who adds: We can no longer hide behind our little finger. »
In London, the G4S group, the main company to which the British government had entrusted the security of the Olympics, found itself, two weeks before the opening ceremony, unable to honor its contract. More than 3,000 additional soldiers had to be mobilized urgently. A Royal Navy assault ship even had to be anchored on the Thames to serve as accommodation for the soldiers during this period.
A prospect that the French army wishes to avoid at all costs, while it is counting on a mobilization limited to 10,000 men. At this stage, it is expected that most of the soldiers will come from ranks of the “Sentinel” operation, which has been carrying out patrols in the cities of France since 2015. About 2,000 others, mainly from the ranks of the Air Force, will be responsible for providing air protection bubbles around the competition sites, in particular for the very complex fight against drones.
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