As Olympic excitement builds, the French train network is hit by an act of sabotage.

Live from the UK, this is the Marketplace Morning Report from the BBC World Service.

I'm Felicity Hanna in Folliana Byrne. Good morning.

Arsonists have targeted French high-speed rail lines in a massive attack hours before the

Paris Olympics opening ceremony. Around 800,000 travellers are affected.

The train company Eurostar is warning people to expect long journeys

and cancellations all weekend.

Amelie Udia Kastra is the Minister for Sport and for the Olympic and Paralympic Games of France.

It will certainly have some impact over the weekend and we are in the process of evaluating

those impacts of assessing the solutions we need to implement.

So it's going to be huge crisis management for us today, but we are prepared for that.

We have all the procedures, we have the the procedures we have the coordination we have

tested those types of scenarios so we will be ready and very soon back on our feet

Emily Odea Kosterra well this has all brought a renewed focus on security at the Olympics,

which has been hugely tightened ahead of the games.

Around 75,000 police soldiers and hired guards are on patrol in Paris,

the largest peacetime deployment in French history,

and it's been quite controversial for Parisian businesses, as the BBC's John Lawrenceon reports.

I'm standing by a bridge that leads over to the islands in the

river Seine, the medieval heart of Paris where Notre Dame Cathedral is. Usually

there be swarms of people crossing this bridge. Now it's empty. It's part of the

grey zone as it's called, surrounded by 44,000 metal barriers and only accessible through police checkpoints.

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