The parliamentary marathon is over for the Olympic law. It was definitively adopted on Wednesday, April 12, by a last vote in the Senate, by 252 votes against 27. The elected representatives of the presidential majority and the right voted in favor of the text, the communists and the ecologists voted against. The Socialists abstained. The National Assembly had already largely approved the text earlier in the week. According to the Minister of Sports and Olympic and Paralympic Games, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, the law “integrates all the measures essential to the smooth running of the Games, ensuring full respect for the rights and freedoms of our fellow citizens”. Obviously, the deputies of the left do not seem of this opinion. They already warned that they would seize the Constitutional Council. As a reminder, the new Olympic law includes an important security component, which was the source of a stormy debate in Parliament and of the opposition of the left. In particular, it provides for the use of algorithmic video surveillance, which is supposed to allow the detection of suspicious behavior or crowd movements thanks to the analysis of images taken by augmented cameras and drones. Its experimentation could concern the Rugby World Cup in France (September 8 to October 28, 2023), then the Paris 2024 Games, theoretically ending on March 31, 2025. Among the other measures planned in the law, let us quote an extension of the field of the administrative investigations on the accredited persons, the creation of two offences in case of infraction on the competition sites, the opening of a health center in the village of the athletes, the authorization of the genetic tests to detect the cases of doping, or finally the opening of the businesses on Sunday in the zones concerned by the Games.
