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The next Summer Olympics will take place from July 26 to August 11, 2024 in Paris. Two years before these Olympics in France, here are the main challenges that remain for the organizers.
The 2012 London Olympics cost $15 billion. Those of Rio in 2016 13.2 billion. As for those in Tokyo, postponed from 2020 to 2021 because of Covid-19, their official cost is estimated at 13 billion dollars.
Each time, the bill soared compared to the budget initially announced for the construction of sports infrastructure and the organization of the event itself. Will France be able to do what no organizer of the Games – summer or winter – has succeeded in recent years: stay in the nails financially?
Fixed in 2017 between 6.6 and 6.8 billion euros, can the provisional budget for Paris 2024 be kept? According to an estimate by AFP, it would now be around 8 billion euros: around 4 billion for the Organizing Committee (Cojo) and around 4 billion for Solideo, the Olympic works delivery company. The global economic context, marked by high inflation, especially in Europemakes the bet of budgetary rigor more difficult to maintain.
One of the strengths of the Paris 2024 file – and one of its arguments for meeting its deadlines and budgets – was the use of already existing sports infrastructures (Stade de France, Roland-Garros, Bercy, Parc des Princes, etc.) or ephemeral in prestigious places (at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, at the Palace of Versailles, at the Grand Palais, etc.).
The main novelties – see site map – relate to an arena in the northeast of Paris which must be delivered in 2023, an aquatic center in Saint-Denis (in the northern suburbs of Paris) available in spring 2024and a climbing wall at Le Bourget.
But the biggest projects are the media village, under construction near Le Bourget airport, and especially the Olympic village, where the athletes will be staying. Village straddling three municipalities (Saint-Denis, Île-Saint-Denis and Saint-Ouen). No major delays have been reported so far.
- Find solutions for public transport
It’s hard to say the same when it comes to public transport. In 2016, Paris’s candidacy file for these Olympic Games strongly emphasized the use of the Grand Paris Expressand network including four new lines metro (15, 16, 17 and 18), with very optimistic deadlines for the end of the works of this pharaonic project. Finally, only the extension of an already existing line (14) to Orly airport should be ready on time.
Under these conditions, how to smoothly manage the movements of the 9.7 million spectators expected during these 2024 Olympics? [1] ?
Ile-de-France transport has in fact been under pressure for several years. The president of the Île-de-France region (IDF), Valérie Pécresse, recently claimed, in a newspaper interview The Parisian, 4 billion euros to the State to modernize transport infrastructure and complete ongoing projects over the next five years. The structure that oversees transport in IDF (Île-de-France Mobilités) also has a debt of 7 billion euros, according to a report by the Institut Montaigne.
It’s a sensitive subject. The fiasco of the Champions League final, which saw excesses around the Stade de France on the sidelines of the Real Madrid-Liverpool match, cast doubt on France’s ability to organize major sporting events well, and this, a few months from the 2023 Rugby World Cup and the next Summer Games.
Questions reinforced by the ambitions of the French authorities for the Paris 2024 opening ceremony : this should consist of a gigantic river parade, with nearly 600,000 spectators along the Seine.
In a recent interim report, the Court of Auditors is also sounding the alarm compared to the needs for the preparation of the 2024 Olympic Games. In this document consulted by the newspaper The chained Duck, the Court of Auditors considers it imperative to step up the pace to meet the considerable security challenge that this event represents. Terrorist threats, cyberattacks, health risks: so many issues that should be at the heart of the discussions among the organizers of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, over the next twenty-four months.
[1] Football matches will take place elsewhere than in the Paris region: in several other major cities in France for football, while Marseille will notably host the sailing events and Tahiti the surfing events.
