Rehearsal of the Olympic Flame Lighting Ceremony: Performers throughout the gown rehearsal for the Olympic flame lighting ceremony for the Paris 2024 Olympics.
| Photo Credit: Reuters
In Paris’ outskirts, a bright-eyed younger woman is keen for the Olympic and Paralympic Games to finish.
That’s as a result of the swimming membership the place 10-year-old Lyla Kebbi trains will inherit an Olympic pool. It will probably be dismantled after the Games and trucked from the Olympic race venue in Paris’ high-rise enterprise district to Sevran, a Paris-area city with much less glitter and wealth. There, the items will probably be bolted again collectively and — voila ! — Kebbi and her swim crew could have a brand new Olympic-sized pool to splash round in.
“It’s incredible !” she says. “I hope it’s going to bring us luck,” adds her mother, Nora.
In 100 days as of April 17, the Paris Olympics will kick off with a wildly ambitious waterborne opening ceremony. But the first Games in a century in France’s capital won’t be judged for spectacle alone. Another yardstick will be their impact on disadvantaged Paris suburbs, away from the city-center landmarks that are hosting much of the action.
By promising socially positive and also less polluting and less wasteful Olympics, the city synonymous with romance is also setting itself the high bar of making future Games generally more desirable.
Critics question their value for a world grappling with climate warming and other emergencies. Potential host cities became so Games-averse that Paris and Los Angeles were the only remaining candidates in 2017 when the International Olympic Committee selected them for 2024 and 2028, respectively.
After scandals and the $13 billion cost of the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Games in 2021, unfulfilled promises of beneficial change for host Rio de Janeiro in 2016 and the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi tarnished by Russian doping and President Vladimir Putin’s subsequent land grabs in Ukraine, the Switzerland-based IOC has mountains of skepticism to dispel.
Virtuous Summer Games in Paris could help the long-term survival of the IOC’s mega-event.
Spreading benefits beyond central Paris
The idea that the July 26-Aug. 11 Games and Aug. 28-Sept. 8 Paralympics should benefit disadvantaged communities in the Seine-Saint-Denis region northeast of Paris was built from the outset into the city’s plans.
Seine-Saint-Denis is mainland France’s poorest region. Thanks to generations of immigration, it also is vibrantly diverse, counting 130 nationalities and more than 170 languages spoken by its 1.6 million inhabitants. For Seine-Saint-Denis kids facing racial discrimination and other barriers, sports are sometimes a route out. World Cup winner Kylian Mbappé honed his silky soccer skills as a boy in the Seine-Saint-Denis town of Bondy.
Once heavily industrialized, Seine-Saint-Denis became grim and scary in parts after many jobs were lost. Rioting rocked its streets in 2005 and again last year. Members of an Islamic extremist cell that killed 130 people in the French capital in 2015 hid after the carnage in an apartment in the town of Saint-Denis and were killed in a shootout with heavily armed SWAT teams. That drama unfolded just a 15-minute walk from the Olympic stadium that will host track and field and rugby and the closing ceremonies.
Concretely, the Games will leave a legacy of new and refurbished sports infrastructure in Seine-Saint-Denis, although critics say the investment still isn’t enough to catch it up with better equipped, more prosperous regions.
Mamitiana Rabarijaona grew up close to the Olympic stadium, built originally for the 1998 soccer World Cup. He says it didn’t provide much of a boost for Seine-Saint-Denis residents. He believes the Olympics will be “a big party” and he will be among 45,000 volunteers who’ll be helping. But he is not expecting Olympic-related investments to magically erase Seine-Saint-Denis’ many difficulties.
“It’s like lifting the carpet and brushing the dust underneath,” he mentioned. “It doesn’t make it go away.” Seine-Saint-Denis bought the new Olympic village that can change into housing and places of work when the 10,500 Olympians and 4,400 Paralympians have left. It is also house to the Games’ solely purpose-built competitors venue, an aquatics middle for diving, water polo and creative swimming occasions. Other competitors venues already existed, have been beforehand deliberate or will probably be momentary.
“We really were driven by the ambition of sobriety and above all not to build sports facilities that aren’t needed and which will have no reason to exist after the Games,” Marie Barsacq, the organizing committee’s legacy director, said in an interview.
Paris’ prices evaluate favourably
At shut to 9 billion euros ($9.7 billion), greater than half from sponsors, ticket gross sales and different personal funding, Paris’ bills to date are lower than for the final three Summer Games in Tokyo, Rio and London in 2012.
Including policing and transport prices, the portion of the invoice for French taxpayers is probably going to be round 3 billion euros ($3.25 billon), France’s physique for auditing public funds mentioned in its most up-to-date research in July.
Security stays a problem for the metropolis repeatedly hit by lethal extremist violence. The authorities downsized ambitions to have 600,000 individuals lining the River Seine for the opening ceremony.
