France wants to distinguish itself by organizing the most sustainable Games in history, a new model for future editions. Will he get it? At what price? Envoy Monica Pinna traveled to Paris to shed light on the gray areas of this great party.
This edition of the Olympic Games It has a particularity: many of the competitions are held in the city center, near the most emblematic monuments of Paris. 95% of the infrastructures are existing or provisional, which has allowed costs to be kept at around nine billion euros. This year’s Olympics are the cheapest games in decades.
Paris 2024: A huge legacy?
The Games have been a great accelerator for the city, explains Pierre Rabadan, deputy mayor responsible for Sports at the Paris City Council. “We have managed to complete in 4 or 5 years works that could have taken ten or fifteen years. It has allowed us transform entire neighborhoods“.
The north of Paris has been subject to huge investments. The Olympic Village is the largest permanent infrastructure built in Sena-Saint Denis, the poorest department in mainland France. It is presented as a avant-garde ecological neighborhood with future. It will become a new neighborhood for 6,000 residents after the Games, but apartments are struggling to sell. The average price of 7000 euros per square meter is too high for Seine-Saint Denis.
This department has become a key venue for the Games. Here is the renovated Stade de France and a brand new Aquatic Center of 175 million euros. However, sport in this department remains a luxury.
“Most of the sports facilities in Seine-Saint Denis are between 40 and 50 years old,” explains Serge Reitchess, former sports teacher, one of the hearts and souls of CoPer 93, local movement for the promotion of school sports and sports equality.
“We have sixteen facilities per 10,000 inhabitants, while the average for the Greater Paris region is 25 and the national one is 50“.
The Olympics have unlocked more than a billion euros for this district, but residents say very little has been allocated to local sports facilities. Renovations and new sports facilities here continue to be too few and not distributed equally, say local administrators. They have been asking for a plan for years. public investment.
They add that the renovations They do not always take into account the real needs of the locals. Alix Rivière, spokesperson for the FCP 93 Parents Federation, explains that Students waste on average an hour getting to and from their sports classes.
“It’s as if they explained to us that, for example, the English or French classroom is 20 minutes from the school. A gym is like a classroom actually“.
Those who were forgotten and left aside by the Games
The Olympic Games promote themselves as “open” and “inclusive”. But the collective’The other side of the medal‘ accuses the organizers of having carried out a “year of social cleansing“before the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
The collective brings together almost a hundred associations and NGOs. They assure that more than 12,500 people have been evicted in the last year, almost 40% more than in 2021-2022. Charities say they are getting out of the way without offering them a definitive solution.
Mathieu Pastor, from the residents’ collective ’20ème Solidaire’, explains to us that “unaccompanied minors and all street people are evicted with the only offer of getting on buses to go to Orleans, Angers or Marseille.”
In early June, about 200 unaccompanied migrant minors were expelled from the cultural center’Steelworkers House‘. They were taken to a municipal gymnasium in Paris. It was the end of three months of occupation and another case of social cleansing caused by the Olympic Gamesaccording to the charities.
“Every day, in Paris, Minority is denied to dozens of young people. Because then no one has to take care of them. The City Council refuses to face this situation, even though it is a left-wing city council with enormous resourceswhich has access to hundreds of thousands of empty homes, which could launch searches, but it doesn’t do anything“.
The Paris City Council responds that wants to find long-term solutions for those who they sleep on the streetregardless of the Olympic Games:
“The City Council participates by making a certain number of premises available. But once you have the premises, you have to make them available, you have to pay the associations to host the people who are there… it is an investment.”
When asked why the City Council has not thought about this beforehand, Rabadán responds: “It is not our responsibility. “The State has to provide the resources to be able to use these places and put people there.”
Will France get set a precedent for the next Games? The medals will come before the answers. The time for controversy is over. The torch has been passed to the athletes, while The Olympic machine is already rolling towards Los Angeles 2028.
