Olympic Marathon Course Lets Runners Inside the Ropes For a Night 10K
Stephanie Jacquet, 49, is not an Olympic athlete, nor any kind of athlete at all.
“This is the first time in my life I’ve ever run anything,” she said. Yet there she was in a runner’s bib and a pink tutu past midnight on Saturday, jogging her way through Paris with tens of thousands of other people, cheered on by the crowds as if she were the most decorated of medalists.
The Marathon for All, as it was called, was the final grand flourish of an audacious Summer Games organized around the revolutionary idea that Paris itself could be a stadium, not apart from the sports but at their center. And so, after the end of the official men’s marathon on Saturday, on a route that took the participants from Paris to Versailles and back — the winner was Tamirat Tola of Ethiopia, with a record time of 2:06:26 — Paris hosted a second marathon along the same route, for non-Olympic runners.
And when that was over came a final event: a 10-kilometer race open to anyone from anywhere, athlete or not, as long as they were at least 16, signed up online, and provided a doctor’s note saying they were fit enough to take part. Half were men and half women; they came from 127 countries and went off in waves, the last leaving just before 1 a.m. The oldest runner was 94. And in a nod to the Olympic year, each race had a total of 20,024 entrants.
Felix Vo, 34, who comes from San Diego but lives in Paris, came straight to the 10K race from the Olympic men’s basketball finals, a game won by the United States. “That gave me the energy,” he said after his event, still on a runner’s high.
Vo said he had no idea what his final time was — he ran alongside several colleagues and a man in a wheelchair — and that mostly he wanted to revel in the sights of Paris, lit up for the occasion. When the runners reached the Olympic cauldron suspended from its ethereal balloon above the Tuileries Garden just in front of the Louvre, many stopped to gape or take a selfie. As they neared the finish, the crowd encouraged them by yelling, “This is the fastest you’ve ever run!”
As with so much else at this Games, the marathon route had history in mind, connecting past and present. It was inspired by the path of the Women’s March of October 1789, when thousands of Parisian women, and a number of men, marched to Versailles, demanding bread and reforms. It was then that King Louis XVI agreed to sign the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a crucial moment in French history (but not enough to save the king, alas for him; he died by guillotine four years later).
Before the Games began, and even up until their final crazy night, it seemed impossible to think in these nervous times Paris could pull off an event requiring so much organization and security. But Jacquet, 49, a Parisian who stayed in town for the Games even as most of her friends fled seeking peace and quiet elsewhere, marveled at how well it had gone. “This was the most amazing idea they could have had, that the Olympics was in a city, not in a stadium,” she said.
That same thought animated the decision to hold the opening ceremony on the Seine itself, and to place many of the competition venues at city landmarks, rather than relegating everything to a walled-off Olympic Park someplace on the fringes of the capital. And so the pure uncomplicated delight of beach volleyball clashed with and was enhanced by the almost obscene majesty of the Eiffel Tower, looming right above it.
The refurbished Grand Palais, with its thrilling glass roof, became the stunning venue for both fencing and taekwondo. Triathletes and others competed in the Seine, fulfilling the quixotic dream of Paris’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo.
Archery may be a bit of a lift as a spectator sport — you see the arrow set off, and then maybe you see it hit a target far away — but its venue, at the Esplanade des Invalides, near the site of Napoleon’s tomb, gave watching it a special resonance. And seeing street sports like skateboarding and breaking in the historic Place de la Concorde, where both Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette lost their heads, was to ponder revolutions both past and future.
“I’m a bit drunk,” said Pierre Benet, 29, of Paris. Draped in a French flag and wearing a felt French cockerel hat that he had purchased on Amazon, he stood among the cheering, dancing crowd along the 10K route after midnight Saturday. An engineer, he had spent Saturday watching the team volleyball competition and drinking beer with a friend. Now, as the clock passed midnight, he had come to support his mother, who is 56 and had impulsively signed up for the race.
“She’s not a runner,” he said. (He also wasn’t sure where she was.) Benet was marveling at how friendly and helpful the local police officers — part of a vast contingent of security forces deployed in Paris — had been all week. As he spoke, several officers could be seen taking selfie videos of themselves at the barricades just as the final group of punch-drunk runners set off noisily behind them.
“The best of all of this is that the Parisians are happy, which never happens,” Benet said.
The father of the Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, a Frenchman whose face has been everywhere these past three weeks, liked to say that the most important thing about the Games “is not winning but taking part.”
That’s how running the 10K race felt to Vo, the American in Paris. “Everybody’s an athlete,” he said.
And unlike in the real Olympics, each participant got a medal.
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