Paris 2024 - Day 9 (July 25th) - Men's Rugby Sevens

Even though the Olympics don’t officially kick off until tomorrow, the Games have become so large that some events have to start early. Today, we have afternoon tickets at the Stade de France for Rugby Sevens. Stade de France is due North from us almost to the northern part of the ring road circling Paris. Beth brought croissants and raisin snails, bananas and orange juice for breakfast the night before. Sean, looking like death warmed over, goes straight for the coffee maker.

Paris 2024 has an app that is supposed to tell us the shorted route to any location in Paris. The app is telling us that we should take Metro Line 13 directly to the Stade de France and that it will take just over an hour to get there. This is good news because the Gaité Metro station is only another 100ft beyond the pizzeria. We are not sure whether we believe the app so we leave a little before noon and hope that we will find somewhere to eat before we get to the stadium. Unlike most Olympics where your tickets let you ride mass transit for free, the French actually increased the cost for the metro and for a Navigo card which lets you ride for free anywhere in the five zones covered by the Metro and RER systems. We had purchased our cards in the US, and they are good for 14 days at a cost of about 10 euros per day. They are simple to use, just tap your card at the entrance and in you go.

Unfortunately, when we arrive at the Saint Denis station, the first security checkpoint is just beyond the Metro entrance and there does not appear to be any eateries nearby. The subway got us here about 90 minutes before the start of the match, so we are way early, and no one is going through security. After about 20 minutes, the line begins to move, but when we arrive, one of the gendarmes tells us that our section is on the other side of the stadium and that we should go through the security line there. This stadium seats over 80,000 people so it is a long walk to the other side of the stadium. The security line is pretty long and while we wait, a man in front of us turns around and asks us in English where we are from. When we tell him Cupertino, California, he starts laughing and says that he used to work in France for Oracle and had been to their headquarters in Redwood City many times. He asks me about the pins I’m wearing on my vest and I explain that this is our 14^th Olympic Games. He says that he is a little worried about whether Paris will be able to provide a great Olympics as it has been very difficult to get around in the leadup to the Games. I hand him one of the 100 or so pins in my giveaway pocket (my goal is to come home with fewer pins than I came with) and he tells us that he hopes we will have a great time in Paris.

It is always interesting to see how security will deal with a guy wearing pins all over his jacket, pins on his head and a good-sized camera lens in his backpack. I’m pleasantly surprised to see that these officers just want to look in my backpack to see if I’m carrying any bombs (I’m not!). They are not yet letting people into the seating area, but we find a satellite version of the Olympic superstore and Sean and I head off to check it out. I don’t see any pins at all, but I do find a nice Olympic metal thermos bottle to replace the one that I trashed in Arles and Sean finds a bucket hat that he likes. We pay (okay, I pay!) and head back outside to find Beth who has been trying to find some shade.

They are still not ready to let people in and now there are huge lines at each gate:

We expect that not everything goes perfectly at the beginning of the Olympics, so this doesn’t faze us. Eventually, the line starts to move. When we get to the front, we find two stops: one to check tickets and the second an additional security check. Paris 2024 is the first Olympics where all of the tickets are electronic (although they are happy to sell you collectable paper replicas) so everyone gets out their phones to have their barcodes scanned. The security check is pretty cursory. They look at my camera, but they mostly wanted to see whether it was really water in my newly purchased thermos. Beth and Sean go looking for lunch while I find our seats. And what seats we have:

              

We are in the fifth row directly on the try line! If all of our A level seats are this good, I’m going to be very happy! Beth and Sean return shortly and report there while the food stands are open, they don’t actually have any food yet.

While we wait, the pregame entertainment starts. The most interesting to me was a short video where they took pictures from the 1924 Olympics in Paris, animated them as if they were singing songs by AC/DC, The Buggles and from the movie Grease (among others). After that, the announcer indicates that they have a guy dressed up like Pierre du Coubertin (founder of the Olympic movement) who will be walking around the arena and that if people see him, they should take a selfie with him and post to social media. Next, they play a trumpet fanfare and teach the crowd that whenever they hear that, they should yet "Allez" (French for Go!). Finally, is a ceremony called les trois coups (literally, the three knocks). The arena host indicates that this is an invention of the French theatre during the reign of Louis XIV. The theatre manager would bang the ground 12 times to indicate that the audience, and particularly the King, were in their seats. This was answered by 3 sharp blows to the ground using a big stick called the brigadier, the first would indicate that the guy running the fly system (the pulleys and counterweights for changing scenery or raising and lowering the curtain) was ready, the second would come from below the stage and the third would come from the opposite side of the stage. When all three blows were sounded, the performance could start. For Paris 2024, they will have former athlete (often French) of the sport for that session conduct les trois coups with the brigadier. Anything that exposes sports enthusiasts to the local culture is a good thing!

Finally, they bring out the teams of Samoa and Kenya, who will be playing the first match. For the uninitiated, Rugby Sevens is a version of Rugby that was developed in Hong Kong in the 1970’s and that has 7 players to a side instead of the usual 15, but on the same size field. Since everyone is running basically all the time, each half takes only 7 minutes instead of the usual 40 minutes. As a result, this is the first of six matches we will see this afternoon. Here are a couple of the Samoan players:

As you can see, most of the players are pretty middle linebacker shaped people. Beth and I have been watching Rugby Sevens on TV for some time so we expected that Samoa would beat Kenya easily and this turned out to be the case as Samoa won 26-0. By this point, Sean is hungry enough to miss some of the game and goes in search of food. He comes back with baguettes with jambon and fromage (sounds so much better than ham and cheese sandwiches!). The second game between Argentina and Australia should be much better as both of these teams are among the leaders in the Rugby Sevens league. We are a little surprised that Australia pulls away to win 22-14 because Argentina was ranked higher coming into this match. In match three, the US is playing Uruguay. Uruguay has just been promoted once and relegated twice in the last three years so the US should win this one. Uruguay keeps it close for the first half but gets worn down in the second half and lose 33-14. The next match is the one that most people in the stands wants to see: France versus Fiji. A lot of people are wearing jerseys with the name of the new French star Antoine Dupont on them. But Antoine only plays limited minutes in the second half and that is not enough, as Fiji prevails 19-12. We’d hoped that all the French fans would leave at this point making it easier for us to depart later, but that did not happen, although the crowd was much quieter after that game. The next to last game featured Japan and South Africa. South Africa had been in the Rugby Sevens league since the inaugural season 1999 while Japan had been relegated in 2015 and had not made its way back since, so we weren’t expecting a close game. And we didn’t get one. South Africa won 49-5 in a game that was so exciting, I took no pictures!  But the final match of the day was much more interesting: Ireland versus the All Blacks from New Zealand. Ireland was ranked number 2 in the world this year while New Zealand was right behind them at number 3 and both teams won their first Olympic matches yesterday. Ireland led 12-0 at halftime, but New Zealand scored in 2^nd half extra time to win 14-12. Here are some pictures from today’s event:

As we started to leave, we were told by the volunteers that the Metro line 13 station we arrived at was closed. That meant a walk with 80,000 of our closest friends to the RER B station. When we finally got to the station, Sean mentioned that it might be faster to walk about a mile and a half to the Metro 12 station. Hmm, walk in the open or be a sardine in 90 F temperatures? We opt to walk through the station, out the other side and head to the nearest Metro 12 station. As we expected, most people did not want a longer walk so we got on the first subway train, and it was not crowded. Win for Team Robie!

Paris must be far to the west of the Central Europe time zone because the sun is still up at 7 PM. Maybe as a result, Parisians tend to eat late – many of the restaurants don’t open for dinner until 7 PM and many are not busy until around 8 PM. We decide to go to a Chinese restaurant around the corner from our Airbnb. All of us are listening carefully to the wait staff to see whether they speak Mandarin. Sean hears enough so when the owner’s wife comes over to place our order, Sean surprises her by ordering in Mandarin. The two of them have a long conversation which includes how it is that Sean can speak Mandarin. Then she tells us that Sean’s Mandarin is much better than her English! Dinner is delicious, but not very spicy. We almost always buy Mongolian Beef as one of our dishes because this is one dish that should be spicy. The fact that it was not spicy may say something about what the Parisians think about spice. We’ll see if the trend continues. Steps for the day: 10,839.