In Seine decision? No

By BRUCE LOWITT

France scrapped its plan to open the 2024 Olympics with a massive boat parade on the Seine after the ship expected to carry the 645 members of the United States team sank three smaller vessels its wake and plowed into two others during a rehearsal Friday on the iconic river.

No athletes were involved and no one drowned or was seriously injured when the kayak containing a stand-in for the lone athlete from Tuvalu and runabouts carrying two men apiece from Swaziland and Bhutan capsized in the wake of the American vessel.

The U.S. ship, carrying 400 winners of a “Sail where our Stars will Sail” fund-raiser conducted – ironically – by USA Swimming, then struck the Jon Boat carrying three miners from Liberia and a motorized dinghy with two goat farmers from Mauritania.

“I never saw those crappy little boats,” said Robert J. Kelly, 85, a retired four-star admiral and former Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet (1991-94), who was piloting the American boat, chosen to do so by Sarah Hirshland, CEO of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, as a “Thank you for your service” gesture.

“Ces putains d’Américains viennent ici gagner des guerres pour nous et pensent qu’ils peuvent faire tout ce qu’ils veulent? Eh bien, merde-les,” French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said. (“Those fucking Americans come over here and win wars for us and think they can do whatever they want? Well, screw them.”)

“The River Seine is one of the main monuments of Paris,” said Pierre Rabadan, deputy mayor in charge of sports. To that end, the city has invested more than $1.5-billion to clean up its water quality for Olympic swimming events “and no bunch of stupid boats, with their drunken athletes and people pissing over the railings is going to mess it up, so I’m glad this foolishness has been canceled.”

The parade of athletes will be held instead, Rabadan said, at the 80,000-seat Stade de France, built for the 1998 World Cup. The decision by Rabadan, a French former international rugby union player, frustrated descendants of André Louis René Maginot, who sought to have all the competitors march across the Maginot Line.