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.
