Paris prepares for 100-day countdown to Olympics
PARIS — In Paris’ outskirts, a bright-eyed young girl is eager for the Olympic and Paralympic Games to end.
That’s because the swimming club where 10-year-old Lyla Kebbi trains will inherit an Olympic pool. It will be dismantled after the Games and trucked from the Olympic race venue in Paris’ high-rise business district to Sevran, a Paris-area town with less glitter and wealth. There, the pieces will be bolted back together and — voila! — Kebbi and her swim team will have a new Olympic-sized pool to splash around in.
“It’s incredible!” she says. “I hope it’s going to bring us luck,” adds her mother, Nora.
In 100 days as of Wednesday, 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 effect 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.
Following 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 longterm survival of the IOC’s mega-event.
The idea that the July 26Aug. 11 Games and Aug. 28Sept. 8 Paralympics should benefit disadvantaged communities in the Seine-SaintDenis 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.