Glistening buildings, crisp bed sheets and security worries: Inside Paris’ Olympic prep

SAINT-DENIS, France — The beds for 10,000 Olympic contestants are already made and the gleaming athletes’ village has been delivered ahead of schedule, as Paris prepares for the world to descend upon its iconic boulevards this summer.

But security worries are hanging over this ambitious party, with organizers admitting this week that several countries are concerned about the Games’ grandiose opening ceremony, a 3.5-mile flotilla along the river Seine.

Paris 2024 will be the first post-coronavirus lockdown Olympics, a coming out party for a global sporting festival whose last two outings, in Beijing and Tokyo, were heavily curtailed.

“The athletes and everybody else are excited, especially after the pandemic,” Nicole Hoevertsz, International Olympic Committee vice president, told NBC News during a tour this week of the athletes  village in the northern Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis.

“The world needs this,” said Hoevertsz, an Aruban former synchronized swimmer who competed at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Today, she is chair of the IOC’s coordination commission for the 2028 Games in the Californian city. “We need to get people in a very peaceful atmosphere,” she said of this summer’s event, “instead of all the things that are happening around the world.”

Officials are portraying these as a pioneering Games, more environmentally conscious and sustainable than past iterations that were criticized for vast overspending and crumbling white-elephant arenas.

A little more than four months out, Paris is ahead of schedule and largely on budget, according to Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College in Massachusetts and a leading authority on Olympic finances.

That progress was evident this week during the tour of the Olympic village. (NBC News’ parent company, the Comcast-owned NBCUniversal, has paid $7.5 billion for U.S. Olympics media rights until 2032 and is the IOC’s largest single source of income.)

Stylish apartment blocks, clad in brick, wooden batons and bronze metals, line wide avenues of contemporary cobblestones. Nestled among these urban citadels were older industrial buildings, revitalized in a neighborhood that had fallen on hard times.

Inside the rooms, the cardboard, recyclable beds used in Tokyo are back. But air conditioning is eschewed here in favor of a geothermal cooling system — waiting to be tested against the city’s increasingly frequent summer heat waves.

This will become 2,800 homes, some of which will be social housing, when the 14,500 Olympic athletes and staff, and then 9,000 Paralympians, have left.

Officials say this will reinvigorate Seine-Saint-Denis, one of the most multicultural but also poorest parts of France. The term banlieue, as these working-class neighborhoods that encircle Paris are known, has become a pejorative in a country in which the ethnonationalist far right is surging amid mounting disillusionment with centrist President Emmanuel Macron.

But some Parisians are concerned that regeneration may, in fact, mean gentrification.

Organizers of the 2012 London Games had said that half of the 9,000 homes in its athletes village would be “affordable housing.” But the current number is just a fraction of that, while the citywide property and rental crisis in the British capital is worse than ever.

Paris ticket prices have also come under fire, the most expensive costing 990 euros (just more than $1,000). Renowned for being brusque at the best of times, some locals have expressed concern about the colossal security operation these Games will entail, necessary because of the unprecedented opening ceremony.

Organizers initially wanted to host 600,000 riverside spectators, most of them free tickets. But this week, they announced that these plans have been drastically scaled back, with the number of spectators cut in half and the only freebies by invitation only.

Officials did not detail their reasoning, but France remains on high alert following a wave of terror attacks in 2015-16 and sporadic stabbings and shootings by lone Islamist attackers since then. Police have been open about the challenges of protecting a flotilla through a dense urban area as opposed to a regular event in a single venue. It’s an operation that will see 45,000 security gendarmes and agents deployed to land, sea and air around the city.

NBC News asked Pierre-Olivier Beckers, chair of the International Olympic Committee Coordination Commission, whether any nations — namely the United States and Israel — have expressed concern about putting their athletes on these boats.

“This is something that is being discussed,” he said during the village tour. “Obviously, we take great care of listening to possible concerns. At the same time, we are reassuring all the delegations that every single step is taken to ensure security at the highest level.”

The Olympics is billed as an apolitical event that rises above global divisions and conflicts, even during war in Ukraine and the Middle East. Critics say this is, at best, naive and, at worst, disingenuous, and that politics and sports have always existed in symbiosis.

The IOC is accused by human rights watchdogs of emboldening authoritarian regimes by allowing them to burnish their image as hosts: from 1936 Berlin to 2008 Beijing and 2014 Sochi. Last year, the committee announced to Kyiv’s fury that Russian and Belarussian athletes who have not publicly supported the war in Ukraine would be allowed to compete in Paris under a neutral flag.

The IOC is also facing another adversary seemingly as ever-present as the Olympic flame itself.

Last summer, French police raided the country’s Olympic headquarters as part of a corruption investigation that prosecutors said was related to favoritism when awarding contracts. It was the third Summer Games in succession in which allegations of graft have disrupted the run-up.

Olympics Games Executive Director Christophe Dubi said in an interview at this headquarters that one of the lines of enquiry had been “dropped” but that the investigation was ongoing, without providing details.

“We cannot comment any further but what we are certain about is” that this has been “a very rigorous process that has been followed,” he said.

NBC News was at the sleek, wood-paneled head office for a glimpse inside the organizers’ final, pregames board meeting. Three dozen assorted Olympics bigwigs from around the world were gathered at a 50-foot oval table under bright lights.

Beckers, the IOC commission chair, gave a warm introduction before journalists were ushered out so that the real discussion could begin. “We are indeed at such an exciting point in the Games, turning the strategic vision into a reality,” he said.

The wider reality is that, amid fears about costs and local opposition, appetite for hosting these Games appears to be declining. Paris and Los Angeles were effectively handed their events unopposed because no other city submitted a final bid.

Still, Olympics chiefs are not contemplating failure.

“If this goes well—“ NBC News began to ask Hoevertsz, before she interjected: “No, it will go well.”

Past scare stories have been just that. The 2012 London Games was dominated by fears that the city would be overrun by riots that broke out the previous summer. Instead, the event was so widely successful that it has entered into the country’s modern folklore.

“I cannot wait for the Games to be here, and to have the stands filled with enthusiastic people cheering on people from all over the world,” Hoevertsz said. “Because that makes the Olympic Games so beautiful.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com