I had hoped they would cancel it - originally, they had planned to continue the competition because of the 5-hr distance from Paris. (The event is in Bordeaux, France.) To me, if the country is under a state of emergency and the borders are closed, the competition's over. You can't expect people to attend given the fact that the attacks took place at public venues.
Maybe something got lost in translation, but saying the organizations were "devastated" to cancel the events was overdramatic, imo. Perhaps they meant to say they were devastated that the killings occurred and it just didn't come across correctly in English.