It was Friday, July 26, 2024, at dawn. Just hours before the opening of the Paris Olympic Games, panic spread among organizers. Trains were paralyzed by a “massive attack” on the TGV high-speed rail network, and torrents of rain were forecast for the capital. The Games had not even begun, and were already turning into a nightmare. But by midnight that same day, France was rubbing its eyes in disbelief, dazzled by the opening ceremony imagined by Thomas Jolly along the Seine. Soon after, the first gold medals for the French team poured in before sold-out arenas.
France quickly plunged into a fervor that, for a fortnight, restored a sense of national pride to a country divided by the snap elections earlier that summer. One year later, what remains of that “enchanted interlude,” apart from memories of shared jubilation in transformed venues?
The Games’ organizers promised a physical legacy. The Olympic Aquatics Center opened to the public on June 2, 2025, in Saint-Denis, north of Paris. The seven other swimming pools built or renovated in Seine-Saint-Denis for the Games helped address the underpriviliged Paris suburbs’ shortage of sports facilities, and the athletes’ and media villages gave rise to 4,000 new homes.
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