Transport in Paris continues to be a major issue for the Olympic Games.

Transport remains a major issue at the 2024 Paris Olympics, 200 days before the event begins, with Portugal’s chief of mission Marco Alves believing all infrastructure will be completed.

In an interview with Lusa, Marco Alves, who reprises the role of head of mission he already held at Tokyo 2020, believes that the issue of transport will be “one of the main challenges of this edition of the Games”, in a city that is usually already “quite busy”.

“The arteries that will serve these facilities are not always very wide, so even the creation, which usually always takes place in the context of the Olympic tracks, [faixas de trânsito específicas para transportes oficiais]In some places it’s really difficult,” he suggested.

The idea of ​​athletes using public transport, advocated by the organizing committee, is rejected by Marco Alves, assuring that they will use transport controlled by the organizing committee.

“Let’s imagine that there is a problem with traffic, an accident, and that in fact the transport that takes athletes to the competition is late due to some kind of problem, the competition has to adapt to this situation. However, the responsibility lies with each of them, so this is not at all the strategy we are going to adopt,” he said.

However, Marco Alves believes that for the rest of the people participating in the Games, public transport, “even if it often allows for this lack of punctuality, with closed metro stations on some routes,” is the best solution, especially the metro.

Regarding security issues, the head of the Portuguese Olympic Committee (COP) recalls that Paris “is a city that is very accustomed to protests” and that in all official visits since 2019 there have always been some kind of protests or strikes.

“Security forces are also used to such scenarios, so there are a lot of contingency plans that are written down on paper, so essentially with the Games as bait, even though there may be some strikes, some… then protests, they can resolve and limit their influence on the organization of the Games. This is indeed a city that has this characteristic and we, being a peaceful country, are not used to such violent demonstrations and, often unfortunately, resorting to some violence, and we naturally have some concerns about this,” he said .

According to Marco Alves, “from the point of view of sports facilities everything is also guaranteed”, especially since “a large percentage of the areas will simply be adapted to the respective competitions”, and only the Water Park and the La Chapelle Arena will have been built.

“But he uses a lot of iconic places in the city, just look at the distribution of the competitions, which take place from Les Invalides to the Place de la Concorde, […] in iconic buildings of the city such as the Grand Palais, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. Many facilities that already exist in the city are used, which, from the point of view of their preparation, provides a different level of security,” he assured.

The Paris 2024 Olympic Games will take place from July 26 to August 11.