Paris 2024: The Sporting Legacy

Paris is a celebration, in 2024 more than ever. But by hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games, Paris is also a fantastic opportunity for France: to give sport a more central place and use its positive social impact in everyone’s daily lives for the future.

“We chose to organise the Games because we believe that sport has the power to change everything”, as Tony Estanguet, President of the Paris 2024 Organising Committee, has insisted ever since the French capital was picked to host the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad.

One hundred years after it last hosted the Games, Paris is at a turning point in Olympic history, we know that. Not least because these will be the first-ever gender-balanced Olympic Games, with as many female as male athletes centre stage. And also because the “City of Light” will be hosting the first Games to fully incorporate the objectives of Olympic Agenda 2020, the strategic roadmap for the IOC and the Olympic Movement. Games that are more responsible, more sustainable – with half the carbon footprint of previous editions – and more inclusive and open in terms of economic opportunities. With this new model, Paris 2024 intends to inspire the organisers of subsequent editions and, more broadly, leave a legacy of methods and tools that will benefit all major events.

Sport and the Games: fantastic drivers of change

The Paris 2024 ambition is (even) greater. It is summed up by the “Games wide open” slogan created by the Organising Committee to cover all aspects. Opening the Games to the challenges facing society means using sport as a driver of change, making its positive social impact a means to combat issues such as physical inactivity, discrimination and gender inequality.

How? By exploiting the acceleration effect of the Games to give sport a more central place – “the place it deserves”, as Paris 2024 likes to say – in a country where it has never been a priority. Something that the Minister for Sport and the Olympic and Paralympic Games, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, summarises elegantly when she calls for France to move from being “a nation of great athletes to a great sporting nation”.

But the reality is very clear: “France is a sedentary and inactive country” according to Michel Cymès, a doctor and Paris 2024 Health Ambassador. A World Health Organization (WHO) study on the level of physical activity and sport among teenagers in 146 countries puts France in 119th place.

“The health effects are catastrophic, and physical inactivity is the third biggest cause of preventable death. In short, more and more children are suffering from illnesses normally seen among old people,” Cymès says.

Physical activity: 30 minutes a day for everyone

Ever since the candidature phase, Paris 2024 has made developing the practice of sport and physical activity the cornerstone of its legacy strategy, with the desire to impact French people’s daily lives and focus particularly on those furthest away from sport. In 2018, the Organising Committee teamed up with the “Pour une France en forme” (For a fit France) group of independent experts, of which Cymès is a member, to take advantage of the Games to boost sport for health. The 30 minutes of daily physical activity programme then became part of these basic ambitions. It was first rolled out in schools, to instil healthy lifestyle habits at an early age and reach all children, whatever their social background. It was then extended to towns and workplaces, in short to everyone’s daily lives.

“When I started in 2018, my role was to create the Paris 2024 education programme (‘Génération 2024’), to bring together the various sport and education stakeholders in France to build a project that everyone could be a part of,” recalls Emmeline Ndongue, a former French national team basketball player, who was previously Paris 2024 Education Project Manager and has now joined the team organising the mass participation events.

Based on the success of similar programmes abroad, in particular “Schools on the Move” in Finland, in 2020 Paris 2024 started encouraging the adoption of 30 minutes of daily physical activity in primary schools, on top of physical education and sports lessons. In cooperation with the French Ministry of Education and Youth, the initiative was successfully trialled and then spread to all primary schools across the country. By the start of the new school year in 2022, 10,000 schools had applied, with 11,000 in 2023.

The roll-out is continuing, and to support it, Paris 2024 and the National Sports Agency (ANS) are co-financing a sports equipment kit which is sent to participating schools. French President Emmanuel Macron has said he wants to expand this further, taking the programme to every school (it is currently being trialled in 700 secondary schools) and increasing it to an hour of physical activity every day by 2026.

So things are in motion, but the Organising Committee wants to do even more, by completely changing people’s attitudes. To bring sport and school closer together and get the education community to work with the sports movement throughout the school year, Paris 2024 launched the “Génération 2024” label. This is given to the most committed schools, with numerous teaching resources and content available to teachers on a digital platform.

Launched in 2017 at the instigation of Paris 2024, the national education ministry and the ministry of teaching and research, Olympic and Paralympic Week (SOP) is a key part of this mobilisation of the education community around sport and the civic values that are part of the Olympic and Paralympic DNA. Over the course of eight editions, the initiative has reached more than five million French students. Of these, almost 100,000 live in Seine-Saint-Denis. This department is a key part of the Games, as it hosts six of the competition venues, including the Stade de France, 11 training venues and the Olympic Village. It is also one of France’s youngest and poorest departments, and the one most lacking in sports facilities. This is why, from the start of the candidature, Seine-Saint-Denis was placed at the heart of the material and social legacy of the Games.

Seine-Saint-Denis at the heart of the Games legacy

The Aquatics Centre, a Greater Paris Council project built opposite the Stade de France, symbolises the ambition to organise Games that will benefit the population. The Organising Committee wanted to make this project, the only sporting facility being built for the Games, a new centre of excellence for French swimming and leave a unique aquatic legacy for this area, where half of 11-year-olds have never learnt to swim. Including this new centre, there will be a total of 17 new pools in Seine-Saint-Denis, plus a refurbished facility. Parallel to this, in 2021, Paris 2024 and the Seine-Saint-Denis Departmental Council launched the “1,2,3 Swim!” programme enabling children, and their parents, to learn to swim free of charge. The involvement of the ANS, the French Swimming Federation, Paris 2024 Premium Partner Groupe EDF and several territorial authorities has taken this initiative to several cities around France each summer. The number of beneficiaries, mainly children aged from four to 12, has thus grown from 2,200 in 2021 to 26,400 in 2023, 9,400 of them in 27 towns in Seine-Saint-Denis.

The Games have sped up urban renovation in the area to make it more attractive: 80 per cent of public investment totalling EUR 1.7 billion has gone to Seine-Saint-Denis. In 2025, the Olympic Village, an econeighbourhood spanning the communes of Saint-Denis, Saint-Ouen and Île-Saint-Denis and designed as a showcase for low-carbon construction and consumption, will provide new homes for 6,000 new inhabitants, the same number of office workers, two schools and new shops. The Media Village will also be a new neighbourhood that will revitalise the towns of Dugny and Le Bourget, including the renovation of eight sports facilities, like the Pablo Neruda gymnasium in Saint-Ouen, which will provide a new gymnastics facility.

The joint effort to leave a material Games legacy spans the whole country, with the French state having launched two huge investment programmes to build or renovate 10,000 sports facilities. The first programme in early 2024 has already provided funding for 5,500 sports facilities, and the second will do the same, with an envelope of EUR 300 million over three years until 2026. Of these facilities, 1,500 will be gender-neutral active and sports schools. This initiative, launched by Paris 2024 and trialled in the town of Saint-Dizier, consists of creating playgrounds with structures and areas inspired by an innovative method known as “active design”, with a more equal space distribution for boys and girls to encourage mixing. In June 2023, the sports ministry created a dedicated fund, managed by the ANS, to speed up the roll-out and support the Terre de Jeux 2024 member communities implementing the initiative.

Use sport and its positive impact for society

Schools again as a key driver. To get the country moving and anchor sport more firmly within society, Paris 2024 is looking further ahead. First by expanding the 30 minutes of daily physical activity initiative in towns and workplaces, particularly through active design planning. Then by highlighting the positive social impact of sport, using it as widely as possible to build the intangible legacy of the Games. Thanks to its endowment fund and “Impact 2024” programme, the Organising Committee is supporting and funding projects throughout France that promote equal access to physical activity and sport, and use the social impact of sport to promote health, education, inclusion and the environment. Since 2020, more than 4.5 million people have been directly impacted through over 1,000 projects, supported with EUR 47.8 million distributed to the people involved on the ground, with EUR 16.6 million coming from the endowment fund alone. Seine-Saint- Denis is one of the key areas for action, accounting for over 20 per cent of the projects supported and, with nearly EUR 11 million invested, almost 19 per cent of the total funding. More than 400,000 direct beneficiaries of the endowment fund live in this department.

Among the projects supported in Seine-Saint-Denis, 54 per cent are intended to promote equality, solidarity and inclusion. The Paris 2024 legacy for the department is also aimed at increasing accessibility to sports activities for people with disabilities. As well as the new neighbourhood created by the Olympic Village, which incorporated universal accessibility right from the design phase, new facilities have been created at Bobigny thanks to the reinforcing effect of the Games: one example is the Greater Paris Inclusive Sport Reference Centre (PRISME).

Built using universal design principles, this will be a training venue for the Paralympic Games and will become a focal point in France for para sport, for elite and amateur athletes alike.

In addition, in 2020, Paris 2024 – with its endowment fund, the French Paralympic Committee (CPSF) and the City of Paris – launched the “Inclusive Club” programme, which enables clubs to create a dedicated para sport section. After an initial trial in Paris, Seine-Saint-Denis was a priority area for testing and then rolling out this programme, which has since expanded across the country thanks to the support of the sports ministry. The target, set by President Macron, is to reach 3,000 inclusive clubs in France by the end of 2024.

Other projects supported are using sport to mobilise and integrate unemployed people, such as “Inser’sport Seine-Saint-Denis”, which has already benefited 2,000 people since its launch at the end of 2022. To “open wide” the economic opportunities of the Games, in addition to the first social charter in the history of the Games, signed by Paris and its social partners, several other tools have been put in place. The “ESS 2024” platform, for instance, has facilitated access to Games contracts for firms in the social economy (ESS), particularly in Seine-Saint-Denis, where 42 contracts are in place with 27 local ESS firms.

A legacy long after 2024

Whether by investing massively in sports facilities or calling for daily physical activity in schools, the French state has decided to make full use of the opportunity that the Games represent for the whole country, making sport the national “Grande Cause” (public interest campaign) for 2024.

“The Games help you get into people’s consciousness. The message gets across and they act on it. The Grande Cause will help to amplify the dynamic still further and ensure that this message is conveyed until December 2024 and long after the Games,” Cymès explains. “We’re not going to stop there!”

The impetus created by the Paris 2024 teams will thus be extended across the country, which is vital for achieving radical social transformation. “In schools, the daily 30 minutes of physical activity are under way, and we’re moving in the right direction,” Cymès says. “If this works out, we’ll have won over a whole generation of children now aged from five to 11. And we know that this is the time that really matters.”

Ndongue is equally optimistic: “Getting a whole country moving demands both energy and compromise. But when we see the success of the Olympic and Paralympic Week, the use of sports kits in schools and raising awareness of the Paralympic Games among schoolchildren, I think we’ve started something. Each time pupils tell me they feel better from doing sport, each time I see them smiling and having fun, I feel a great sense of satisfaction.”

To build a lasting legacy and create a long-term dynamic, Paris 2024 has innovated by starting to assess the various actions taken and their impact even before the Games. This is true especially for the 30 minutes of physical activity in schools, on which a qualitative study was carried out in 2020 and 2021 by teachers in the Créteil academy, where the initiative was trialled. The study confirmed the positive effects of physical activity on the pupils. The assessment, carried out by the Organising Committee, with the IOC and the Sports Law and Economics Centre in Limoges following recommendations from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), is being supervised by an assessment monitoring committee. Several reports have already been issued, with a final update due to be published after the Games. Cymès already has no doubts about the positive impact: “We’ll be able to accurately measure the legacy and success of the Games through these studies. And if there is only a 10 per cent increase in physical activity, that will already be a big win. Because I’m convinced that the Games will have a snowball effect: the newcomers will be our best ambassadors, leading others to take up sport.”

And to ensure that this is a lasting legacy, Paris 2024 has already planned ahead: handing them over to the state and the sports movement will ensure that the programmes with the biggest impact continue.

Will Paris 2024 be the start of a new era for sport and those who practise it in France? “Above and beyond the performances by the athletes during the Games, the key is knowing how to use all this sport to bring together, onboard, educate, protect and carry as many people as possible. The Games bring people together, and that’s how they have a social impact,” Ndongue explains. And if the Winter Games are held in France in 2030, this will go even further.

Published in the Olympic Review 122