Cole Pepper
As the Olympic athletes receive their laurels at the games in Paris, questions about the impact of hosting major sporting events continue to be raised.
Does a city or country benefit from major events like the Olympics or the World Cup? Does the general populace see the benefits? And how is policing impacted as a result of the ramp-up of security needed for events like the Olympic games?
University of Massachusetts-Lowell Associate Professor Patrick Young said the impact of the games comes down to artifice vs. reality.
“These spectacles can only go so far. And I think that’s the delusion that sometimes I get caught on in watching this stuff, is it’s not politics,” Young said.
“If you want to address inequality, if you want to address climate change, you need to have a functioning democratic politics. France doesn’t really have that right now. America doesn’t really have that right now. They kind of have these political systems that are in the throes of crisis. And so, you can bring in money, you can bring in attention, you can build some infrastructure, but there needs to be empowerment and buy-in from the communities that are most affected, if it’s going to be a lasting change.”
Young points to the Paris plan of utilizing an area of the city, the Saint-Seine-Denis department, north of the city, where the athletes’ village is constructed. The housing took over former industrial buildings, in some cases forcing out residents, many of whom are immigrants, who had to find other living situations.
“In this area, north of Paris, which is generally poorer than other parts of France, which has a higher proportion of French of immigrant background, or currently immigrant status, and is very much in need of improvement in infrastructure and more affordable housing, and so that’s the question, is whether those things are going to come in the wake or what you’re already seeing is it’s going to be gentrification,” Young said.
“Because Paris is so expensive and people can’t really live there anymore, and all of the Airbnbs that they’ve tried to get out of Paris are going to go up there. And so are you going to have this neighborhood where it’s going to be more unaffordable for people of low income and marginal social and economic status to be able to live?”
Young said the concern over the follow-on impact on policing is also an issue to watch. Last Summer, French President Emmanuel Macron came under fire after police killed a 17-year-old motorist. Rampant protests followed.
In the lead-up to the games, Paris police officials announced that 30,000 police per day would be activated and, on some days, as many as 45,000 police would be active around the games.
What happens after the games end? Many of the resources remain, leading to increased policing.
“It was true in the LA Olympics in 1984 and then the whole Rodney King situation was a few years after that,” Young said. “It creates what the French call ‘l’état d’exception,’ a state of exception, so the normal rules don’t apply. They can do things and they can try things that they can’t normally do in this state of exception.
“And so, any mass event like this, you know, particularly the Olympics, I think, creates a situation in which security kind of becomes a whole world unto itself. They get a lot more money, there’s a lot more investment, there’s a lot more experimentation. And so what you have at the end of it is a police force which is much more fortified than it was at the beginning of the event. That’s something that’s kind of happening in the background.”
In the past, Olympic and World Cup hosts have seen huge investments in infrastructure only to see those structures fall into disrepair.
After the 2000 Athens games and the World Cup in Brazil in 2014, venues were abandoned and never used again. Unlike in Atlanta, where the Olympic Stadium in 1996 became Turner Field, home to the Atlanta Braves and now is the football stadium for Georgia State University, some countries do not consider the future use of venues when putting on the game.
If done correctly, Young said, Olympic and World Cup structures would become community assets after the events. He is skeptical about the future impact of the structures built for the Paris games.
“If you built the Olympic village there, you would not only build more housing, but you would build more facilities for the population,” Young said.
“And then that Subway project is also about connecting that area, not only to central Paris but to other areas around it as well, so that in the aftermath of it, the people would be better provided for and better connected and less marginalized and ghettoized. That’s the theory. But again, like, we know that a lot of times this plays out as gentrification.”
