The first many of us knew about the Paris attacks was when Simon Kuper, of the Financial Times, tweeted about a bang outside the Stade de France that sounded suspiciously louder than a firework. His instincts were right. The onslaught against the French capital started in sport.
We have now heard what sound like 2 bomb explosions right by the Stade de France. Play continues merrily. Some unease here #FRAGER
— Simon Kuper (@KuperSimon) November 13, 2015
At 9.20pm on Friday, one of the attackers blew himself up at Gate D of France’s national stadium, where Les Bleus where playing Germany in a ‘friendly’. The blast heard by players and spectators inside the ground was the spark for a murderous assault on central Paris.
Spectators find sanctuary on the Stade de France pitch on Friday
Most of what has followed the terrorist outrages of Friday falls into the categories of grief, anger, remembrance, politics, security and retaliation. But there is another visceral response that will remain largely unseen.
This week, and for the foreseeable future, the faint hum of anxiety that comes with attending a major public event will be heightened in sport, because the France‑Germany game and the Stade de France were picked out by the perpetrators as targets; as symbols of the culture they want to destroy.
The particular demonisation of France by Isil was clearly a factor. Another may have been the presence of François Hollande, France’s president, at the match. So it does not follow that all sport is now always a target. But nobody boarding a train to a game or passing through a turnstile will take that hope for granted. Few will travel to Wembley oblivious to the implied threat, or entirely free of some kind of anxiety.
Few will be oblivious to thoughts of danger as they walk to Wembley
Many times since the Munich Olympic murders of 1972 have commentators declared sport’s relative immunity from terrorism to be over.
In the past few years alone we have seen the Sri Lanka cricket team attacked, the Togo team bus strafed with bullets as it travelled through Angola, and the 2013 Boston Marathon torn apart by two bombs that killed three and wounded 260.
At the 1996 Games in Atlanta, the Olympics seemed to be tipping back into the Munich vortex when a pipe bomb exploded in a fan zone.
The perpetrator, though, turned out to be a deranged former US Army explosives expert called Eric Rudolph whose aim was to “confound, anger and embarrass the Washington government in the eyes of the world for its abominable sanctioning of abortion on demand”.
• France train under armed guard
The crisis soon passed. But the Paris attacks break new ground, from which there is no going back. In a vanished time sport would often comfort itself by thinking no terrorist group would invite a potentially fatal backlash by attacking fun and games.
Deluded or not, this faith in the inviolability of sport was a useful accompaniment to enhanced security at venues (which everyone moans about, but few, now, would want to be without).
An armed guard looks on as France train
Complacency has been scattered to the winds, which is what the sociopaths who attacked Paris will have wanted.
While one part of the brain shouts defiance, another succumbs to unavoidable dread. All we can do, in those circumstances, is to accept the threat to life as omnipresent, and therefore as something to be set aside, rather than a fear to be succumbed to.
The echoes of Friday night at the Stade de France will last a while in sport, but the same is true of every space where people gather, and so all we can do is resist the creeping urge to stay at home, which would present a victory to the authors of the Paris atrocity.
• Extra armed police to patrol Wembley in wake of Paris attacks
The strongest of the echoes is that at least one of the Stade de France assailants had a ticket to the match, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, whose sources claimed that the attacker tried to enter the ground 15 minutes after kick-off but was stopped after being frisked in a routine search. It was this that caused him to detonate his suicide vest. Two more attacks then followed – all outside the ground.
The Wembley arch is lit up in the colours of the French flag
The intention here sends the biggest chill: the intention to enter a football stadium and shred the lives of random spectators, for the crime of simply being there, in the city of “perversions”, as the demented Isil statement put it.
Football, which is beloved by countless millions of Muslims, was thus reclassified by violent jihad as an abomination, a stage for idolatry (or, more strategically, a means by which to generate maximum fear, along with rock concerts and restaurants).
• FA: eyes of the world on Wembley
Part of the aim therefore was to steal all peace of mind from parents wanting to walk up Wembley Way with their children to see England play a multicultural France team. That kind of attempted larceny never works.
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