Olympics naysayers would be given short shrift at the moment in and around the Paris suburbs of Le Bourget and Dugny.
Following the formal launch a €650 million regeneration project of 70 hectares, the self and the external perception of this flat plains hinterland some 20 kilometres to the north of Paris will undergo an existential change.
The new Gymnase Marie Paradis – named in homage of the first woman to climb Mont Blanc – forms the centrepiece of a revamped sports complex in the Le Bourget end of the grandly titled Cluster des Médias.
Cross a new footbridge over the A1 motorway into Dugny and voilà Le Plateau and L’Air des Vents – two tranches of land dotted with slick new apartment blocks providing just over 1,000 new abodes in what has been anointed the Village des Médias.
Aptly named too. For the first technicians will arrive from abroad over the next few days to use the homes as lodgings while they toil at the nearby International Broadcast Centre at the Le Bourget Exhibition Centre during the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Once they’ve all gone home, the homes will be spruced up and sold as part of the fabled legacy strand of the contemporary Olympics extravaganza.
Chance
“It's essentially an opportunity for people from Dugny to buy a home ... especially those who couldn't necessarily afford one,” said Quentin Gesell, the mayor of Dugny.
“It's a chance for people from Dugny as well as from all over the Seine Saint Denis region to get larger homes to accommodate their growing families."
Gesell – born and bred in Dugny – knows the misfortunes of living in an outback squeezed in between Le Bourget airport and the 400-hectare Georges Valbron park. Promises. Promises. Promises. So many made over the years, he recounts.
“The Universal Exhibition in 2004 was supposed to take place on the site of the media village, but unfortunately it was abandoned,” lamented the 30-year-old.
“But the Olympic Games has been the project that has made the regeneration happen. And it's something to be proud of. In the town where I grew up, we're going to welcome the whole world here.”
After the Games, another 13 hectares will be added to Georges Valbron park following the clean-up and landscaping of the former military oil and gas storage site Le Terrain des Essences. The 20-hectare Air des Vents – which has been mainly used as a car park for the Le Bourget Air show a – will become a separate park.
During the games, the climbing walls inside the Gymnase Marie Paradis will act as a warm-up and training zone for the sport climbing which will take place on the specially constructed walls outside between between 5 and 10 August.
And though the walls outside will disappear along with the temporary stands, the climbing walls inside the gym will remain for use by the soon to be installed Le Bourget sport climbing club.
Traditional gymnasium sports such as badminton, volleyball, handball and basketball will share the space which acted as an impromptu salon for the inauguration of the Cluster des Medias.
Pride
“I take my hat off to you all,” sports minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra said in front of 200 or so engineers, landscapers and artisans who had worked on the revamp.
As industry minister Roland Lesclure stood approvingly at her side, she added: “You've worked very hard over the years and now you're delivering a whole complex, a whole extraordinary area, on time.
“It will allow us to be extremely proud to welcome more than 1,500 journalists and technicians from all over the world.”
If the Cluster des Médias serves as a microcosm of French technical diligence and wondrousness, security concerns highlighted the fragilities swirling amid the pomp and circumstance.
Fear
France has asked its foreign allies to send several thousand members of their security services to help guard the Olympic, it emerged on Thursday.
Poland's defence minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz confirmed his country was joining an international coalition established for the Olympics.
It is understood that the French government has asked 46 allies to send just over 2,000 police reinforcements to join up to 45,000 French police and gendarmes who will be deployed each day during the Olympics between 26 July and 11 August. Another 20,000 private security guards will be on the ground for the Games.
"The terrorist threat is real," French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said on Monday as he announced that the country's security forces had been placed on emergency alert – the highest level – following a terrorist attack in Moscow on 22 March that left more than 130 people dead and hundreds wounded.
Future
Thoughts of such atrocities were far from the thoughts of the local and regional dignitaries standing or glad-handing their way around the Gymnase Marie Paradis as Oudéa-Castéra and Lesclure concluded their cheerleading.
Gesell, though, was happily landlocked and loaded to enjoy the future.
"We've not been well known as a town," he conceded. "But now we find ourselves at the centre of the universe due to the Cluster des Médias.
"And we're also getting closer to Paris too. In three years, we'll have the Grand Paris Express railway and the automatic metro lines 16 and 17. So it's a really great opportunity to come and live in Dugny."
Cheaper housing costs will certainly embellish the allure as prices within the confines of inner Paris continue to rise.
Gesell added confidently: "We'll be able to come to this area in 10, 20, 30 or 40 years and say that the Paris 2024 Olympic Games were here and look at what's left."
