Five months on from that balmy summer of love for all things Olympic and Paralympic, the graft goes on in the chill midwinter for Mathieu Hanotin, mayor of Saint-Denis.
The 46-year-old was among several French local government chiefs guiding counterparts from Brisbane and its satellite towns and cities around Olympic sites in Saint-Denis and Saint-Ouen on the northern outskirts of Paris just before the start of the school holidays.
The Australian delegation comprising inter alia the mayors of Brisbane, Logan, the Sunshine Coast and the Scenic Rim, were in Paris for three days gathering facts and touchy-feely niceties to help them organise the Olympic Games in 2032.
Their early morning labours took them to Saint-Denis Pleyel metro station, the athletes' village, across a footbridge over the river Seine and a walk along its spruced up banks.
"Saint-Denis wants to be put on the map of the Parisian metropolis," said Hanotin, breaking away from the solicitations.
"It wants to be on the map in France and internationally, as the hub, the great hub of hospitality," he said.
"We want it as a place where people come to stay and to have fun so we're obviously going to continue with this kind of marketing ... a kind of soft power."
All creatures great and small on the Paris 2024 organising committee paraded legacy as one of the most important features of France's Olympic Games.
Great pride was taken, for example, that the 11,000 seats for the Aquatics Centre in Saint-Denis and the La Chapelle Arena a few kilometres to the south were made from recycled plastic by a French company based in Aubervilliers just to the north of Paris.
Feeling
Post rush-hour of a February morning, Saint-Denis Pleyel station – opened just before the 2024 Games – gleams space-age grandeur though the path from the metro Line 14 terminus to the athletes' village some 800 metres away screams project unfinished.
"It was very important for us to be able to organise this visit for the people from Brisbane," added Hanotin. "We've done it for the teams organising the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in three years.
"We have become members of the Union of Olympic Cities and we want to be able to share what we have acquired over the seven years of work preparing for our Games."
The yield was enthusiastically embraced. "It's just been incredible to see some of the infrastructure and the legacy that the Olympics have left for communities," beamed Rosanna Natoli, mayor of Sunshine Coast. which is scheduled to host four venues and nine Olympic and Paralympic events during the antipodean extravaganza.
"That's what's been most impressive for us," added Natoli, a former TV journalist who was voted in as mayor in March 2023.
"Legacy, it's what we all talk about but during this trip what we're able to see is the actual delivery here after the Games of 2024.
Material
"And that's what's really been so astonishing. It's really heartening to know that those sustainability goals, those environmental goals and those social goals for the people of Paris have been been delivered. And that's what we are hoping to do for the people of south-east Queensland in 2032."
During the three-hour tour of the utterly concrete and tangible, Karim Boumrane, mayor of Saint-Ouen, injected the metaphysical.
"Everybody has to understand that this Olympic Games is for them," expounded the 50-year-old who grew up in his mayoral fiefdom.
"That's the first point," Boumrane told the Australian delegation as they paused for coffee and croissants in a former electricity turbine hall en route to a renaissance as offices for the Ministry of the Interior.
"Legacy comes in terms of parks, in terms of public infrastructures and the bridges and that brings us pride," he added.
Sharing
"We provided pride to the people and now we provide a sharing of excellence, a sharing of the beauty and the last point ... we share a feeling of security. There is the feeling that when you are in this district, you feel well, whatever your colour, whatever your religion, whether you are LGBT or heterosexual, we don't care. You will feel well."
Ripples of applause proceeded Boumrane's paean. And in the glow of the peroration, the perambulation.
The delegation was led up 14 storeys in swift lifts to the top of the tallest building in the athletes' village where a roof terrace furnished panoramic views of Olympic venues such as the Stade de France and Aquatics Centre as well as conventional gems such as the Eiffel Tower.
"Good things take time," exhaled Brisbane mayor Adrian Schrinner after breathing in the splendour of the vistas. "Even here in Paris, good things take time.
"In Brisbane at the moment, we're just finishing the planning phase and then we move into the delivery phase.
"The trip has been an incredible learning experience for us," added the 48-year-old. "And most importantly we've created some great connections.
"They're relationships that will last and that will really help us when it comes to gearing up for the Olympics in seven years time."
