The great festival is over, the Olympic Games that have been held in Paris are over, and "popular joy" has been highlighted when it comes to valuing. In fact, the party is not over, we should, in principle, be halfway through the date, as the Olympic Games end and the Paralympics happen to them. But capacitism is so deeply rooted, that this second part is hardly given the importance, attention and mention.

President Emmanuel Macron has taken advantage of this sports event to "ruin his politics" and to "neutralize criticism of his person": I want to tell you how proud I am in French. There is a loser: the spirit of failure. Seven years ago everyone told us that it was crazy to take the Olympic Games; that the opening act on the Seine was a safe recklessness for security; that we would never win enough medal; that it would be a financial hole; that you could not bathe on the Seine... And in the end we have achieved it, we have done it! ". This is the official general assessment, mainly extended: the result is positive in all respects.

However, while not disregarding the impact this quote has on the citizens to set the summer and alleviate the weight of everyday life, some citizens also want to make visible the shadows of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The leftist party LFI France Insumisoa has set up a popular committee of inquiry to evaluate the damage produced in the social, ecological and economic fields. Sports agents, collectivities, services and users of the public sector, citizens, anti-exclusion activists... LFI will meet with everyone and make a broader analysis. Because in addition to sweet, she also has dates from sportsmen and sports enthusiasts from gacela: "Alongside the admirable image of the 2024 Olympic Games, tonnage children cannot play sport."

14,000 evictions

Agent Le revers de la médaille [the back of the medal] is composing the number of homeless people expelled from Paris and their environment. From May 2023 to June of this year, in particular, 12,545 people have been expelled from the camp of the Olympic and Paralympic Games – 14,000 people, including those killed in July. The Le revers de la médaille group brings together 104 groups, associations and unions, including Action contre the Faim against hunger, the League for Human Rights LDH or the well-known La Cimade associations working for immigrants. Detailed work has been done on the count of each expulsion, the investigation of the official expulsion orders and the collection of testimonies. Almost half - 5,600 people - have been sent to emergency shelters from other French regions. But, for example, the pool solution has served for a few weeks, and obviously they have been on the streets since then, as they generally have little space in these emergency services.

We note the profile of the 5,600 sent to another city in the French State and we find the French Government’s poor reception policy. All of them are immigrants, of whom 40% are undocumented and have been pushed to apply for a residence permit - with the risk of being expelled from the State - because the conditions for access to the papers are becoming harder and harder in the French State.

There are also those who have refused to go to the surrounding cities: 1,300 of them have taken refuge in the services of Paris, but only for 30 days, and the minors have accumulated in the sports clubs, also for them, with a departure of a few weeks.

Thus, the number of those who were actually evicted from the streets of Paris was 216: 1.5% approx. "A drop of rain", according to the collective Le revers de la médaille; but "the human effect of the Olympic Games", according to Macron, are some of the conclusions.

"As in the Paris Olympic Games, the Parisian people have removed those who do not fit in the postcard. (...) It is regrettable to see this tendency to preserve the reality of the city and its own poverty. It hides under the cover and is not being looked at," says Antoine De Clerck, a member of the Refugee Food Group. The same opinion is expressed by former American athlete and researcher Jules Boykoff. He is a specialist in the Olympic Games and is usually in the cities where the appointments are received to investigate what has had a social impact on them. He says gentrification from these kinds of quotes is inevitable. The department of Seine-Saint-Denis, which hosted the Olympic and Paralympic Games, is the poorest in France and has 28.4% poverty.

Gentrification, inevitable

In the city of Saint-Denis, for example, the sportsmen’s quarter has been built, hostels for 9,000 parathletes and 14,500 athletes. These are intermediate dwellings, but from the autumn they will be connected to the works and will become stable dwellings, proposing a total of 2,200 new dwellings. The price of the square meter will be sold for EUR 7,000, while currently the square meter will cost EUR 4,000. In other words, the famous sports event has left them with homes that, to a large extent, will be inaccessible to the local population of immigrants and workers. This offer will bring a new population, and it is already noticeable, seeing that in the last five years the prices of housing in Saint-Denis have increased by between 30 and 40%.

 

 

 

 

Like the athletes’ neighborhood, a large number of infrastructures have been built. They have influenced the dynamics of local life and space, very different from what has been done so far: part of the collective garden of Aubervilliers of seven hectares has disappeared to build the pool of the Olympic Games; they have covered the park of Dugny with the veins to build the district of journalists, with three schools, one hotel, two homes and nineteen companies dismantled...

Journalist Jad Lindgaard, resident in Seine-Saint-Denis, has named this urban process as "Olympic extractivism": "Extremism refers to a mining or oil industry. In a poor territory, it extracts resources from the land for later valuation in international markets. This financial value benefits the industry and not the population that pays the price of destroying its ecosystem. Paris 2024, real estate capitalism has been completely reconfiguring the city. A great deal of money has been spent, in a speedy manner, without consulting the population. What happens is that it will benefit private investors and not the population. The homes sold will be inaccessible to the vast majority of people in Seine-Saint-Denis for not having access to bank loans. It's a social justice problem." Paris 2024 . Une ville face à la violence olympique (Parise 2024. A city, faced with Olympic violence, has just published its book, and has offered an interview to the independent media Reporterre.

Algorithm control

Cameras and image tracking algorithms came to them to curb those unintended infrastructures for the local population. France has become the first Member State of the European Union to legalise this intensive care technique. In particular, images control and, in this case, the responsibility of identifying eight phenomena is assigned to the algorithms: motion in the opposite direction; access to a forbidden space; presence and/or use of a weapon; fire start; movement of people agglomeration; a person on the ground; excessive multitude; and abandoned package. In case of identification, the algorithms lead the alert. It is presented as an experimentation that, even after the Olympic and Paralympic Games, will be channeled "in sporting events, cultural events and leisure moments", at least until 2025. The association La Quadrature du Net, which studies the numerical field and human rights, is concerned: This law for the Olympic and Paralympic Games is the "Trojan horse", which came to stop and spread among the public.

The association considers that this is a technique that goes against human rights and freedoms, precisely because it investigates human attitudes. "It's one more step in accessing our lives, increasingly intrusive technologies. (...) In recent years, the French authorities are increasingly extending the power of police surveillance. More cameras, more drones and now algorithms. We worry because maybe the next step is facial recognition. This goes against rights," says Katia Roux of Amnesty International.

In the end, Jokoz Jokoa is the same thing: outside the focus of euphoria and the cameras of the event, social and ecological damage. He was denounced in Paris, he was denounced in Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, London, and he will be denounced in Los Angeles in four years' time. Lindgaard associates this inescapable fatality with the "lack of transmission of militant memory", the "very positive image" of the Olympic and Paralympic Games and the idea that the International Olympic Conference CIO is the richest association in the world: "The relationship of forces is not in the interests of citizenship," he added.