(Bloomberg) -- Paris went ahead with its 2024 Olympic Games opening ceremony, after a “massive attack” on France’s super-fast rail network disrupted trains and cast a shadow over the event.
“Coordinated malicious acts targeted several TGV lines last night and will seriously disrupt traffic until this weekend,” French Transport Minister Patrice Vergriete wrote in a post on the X social network.
Traffic on a small number of the impacted train lines started to resume by early afternoon local time on Friday. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said the opening ceremony would go on as planned, adding that transport inside the city hadn’t been affected.
In the early hours of the morning on Friday, fires were discovered at three critical rail-line nodes and an attempt at a fourth site was thwarted, Jean-Pierre Farandou, the head of the national rail company SNCF, said on BFM TV. Many trains were canceled or delayed, with about 800,000 passengers affected.
The acts of sabotage were carried out in a “premeditated and coordinated fashion,” said Gabriel Attal, the French caretaker prime minister, noting that the sites picked “show a certain knowledge of the network.”
SNCF couldn’t immediately say if this was the biggest disruption the train operator had ever faced, although it wasn’t able to come up with an incident that had affected more travelers over a weekend.
“It’s absolutely appalling,” French Sports Minister Amelie Oudea-Castera said on BFM TV. “Acting against the Games is acting against France, it’s acting against your own camp, your own country. They are not the Games of a government, they’re the Games of a nation.”
There have been no official statements over who might be behind the attacks. SNCF doesn’t know who the perpetrators are, said Franck Dubourdieu, head of the company’s TGV Atlantique routes. Meanwhile, Paris prosecutors said in a statement that they are investigating the matter.
Dubourdieu said SNCF is using 50 drones as part of its process to check specific areas along the 30,000-kilometer (18,641-mile) rail network.
“It’s difficult to accept because obviously we’ve been working for months to make sure that everything was going to happen properly and today, it’s hard to accept,” he told reporters in front of the Montparnasse train station.
Over the last few weeks, French government officials have evoked the possibility of the far left or Russia trying to sabotage the Games. Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin told RTL radio on Friday that four attack plans targeting the Olympics had been foiled in the past few weeks by his services.
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The disruptions come amid heightened security across Paris, with some 45,000 police and military officials on patrol and barriers set up around the Seine ahead of an opening ceremony that will feature boats sailing down the river, the first of its kind.
In preparation, large sections of the city have been cordoned off, with Olympic sites, train stations and tourist landmarks guarded by gun-toting officers, including counter-terrorism units and the military.
Eurostar said services to London and Brussels from Paris were affected, and several trains have been canceled or delayed. It said high-speed trains going to and from Paris will be diverted, extending the journey time by around an hour and a half. At Gare du Nord, Paris’s Eurostar train station, a long line of people waited to reschedule their trips.
Nabeel, a 24-year-old trainee analyst who lives and works in London but had been visiting his family in the Paris region, said he was able to switch to a slightly later train with no problem. He said he was told his trip would take longer than usual.
“In hindsight, I should have chosen another day,” he said, declining to provide his full name for privacy reasons.
Meanwhile, chaos reigned at the key Paris rail hub of Montparnasse, with public address announcements reeling off a series of canceled trains.
“I’ve been here for three hours and I’m going home now,” said Julien Mercier, 29, who was headed to Morlaix in Brittany for a three-day weekend with his parents. Carrying his bicycle in a carry-bag and a backpack, he said he’d try to reschedule for later in the summer. “It is a bit worrying, that they were able to coordinate this, do it today with the Olympics opening and all the security.”
SNCF said later Friday that traffic on the eastern high speed line will resume as normal from 6 a.m. Saturday, while 80% of trains on the northern axis used by Eurostar will run with delays of one to two hours through Sunday. Two thirds of scheduled trains heading to Britanny and the southwest from Montparnasse will run on Saturday, with delays of one to two hours.
“The exceptional mobilization of several thousand railway workers, including over a hundred working specifically on repairs, will enable TGV traffic to improve tomorrow on the routes affected by the acts of sabotage,” it said in a statement. A total of four trains were scheduled to transport Olympic athletes today. Of those, two were able to complete their trips, one was rescheduled and one was canceled.
Transport Minister Vergriete said that there was no proof the attacks targeted the opening ceremony, adding that it had mainly affected the departure of hundreds of thousands of people going on vacation this weekend.
SNCF’s Farandou said the arson acts were timed for the “day of big departures,” when a large number of French people leave for their summer holidays.
“It’s the French that were attacked,” Farandou said.
--With assistance from Benoit Berthelot, Angelina Rascouet, Albertina Torsoli, Tom Fevrier and William Horobin.
(Updates with latest details on traffic and repairs.)
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