Paris 2024 Olympic Games: did the popular Seine-Saint-Denis win Olympic gold ?

Construction Work Underway As Paris Prepares To Host 2024 Olympic Games MAXPPP – Vincent Isore

Barely five hundred meters separate the Stade de France from the Cité des Francs-Moisins in Saint-Denis. Five hundred meters but a world of difference between the seats costing several hundred euros at the flamboyant temple of the next Olympic Games and the drab large complex gangrened by poverty.

A resident of the massive gray blocks of this city undermined by drug trafficking, known as one of the most difficult in Seine-Saint-Denis, Samia Achoui will see nothing of the Olympic Games that will be held across the street from her house from July 26 to August 11.

Games largely in Seine-Saint-Denis

Tickets ? "Too expensive" for this secretary who didn't even try to buy any. The sixty-year-old will be satisfied, she says, with "the sound of applause" coming from the stadium, just on the other side of the Saint-Denis canal.

Because despite their name, the Paris Games will in reality be held largely in Seine-Saint-Denis, on the other side of the ring road which marks the demarcation – both physical and symbolic – between the capital and its proletarian suburbs.

The northern department of Paris, which hosts four competition sites and several key structures such as the athletes' village, is among the most criminogenic in the country – often associated abroad with the chaos around from the Stade de France during the Champions League final in 2022.

JO 2024 : deux modules de skateboard légués à la Seine-Saint-Denis après les épreuves https://t.co/uDs36fL7Ew

— Les Echos (@LesEchos) July 9, 2024

During the candidacy, the promise was to regenerate this territory of 1.6 million inhabitants, a third of whom live below the poverty line.

The same bet was made in 2012 in Stratford, the poorest district of London, with mixed results. Integration, housing, employment, image: how will these Games change ( or not) the life of the inhabitants in the front row ?