France’s forgotten athletes: As the world tunes in to the Olympics, many of Paris’ poorer suburbs see little benefit

When the world’s best athletes arrive at the Stade de France for the Olympics, they will find state-of-the-art facilities, but that isn’t the case for all in Paris.

When the world’s best track and field athletes arrive at the Stade de France for the Paris Olympics later this month, they will compete in state-of-the-art facilities: a newly renovated purple track, better lighting and bigger screens in the stands. Fans who want to watch an event like the 100m final on August 4 will have to shell out between $300 to more than $1,000 for a ticket. But if you walk a short distance away from the sparkling Stade de France, which is about six miles from downtown Paris, you’ll find a very different world. Seine-Saint-Denis, the northeastern department – roughly equivalent to a county in the US – where the stadium is located, is the poorest in mainland France, and for many of its 1.7 million residents, accessing facilities even close to the caliber of the Stade de France is a pipe dream. Olympic organizers like to pride themselves on the legacy of the Games and the “long-term benefits” they say they create for the host city and “its people.” Paris had pledged to revitalize Seine-Saint-Denis, home to many “banlieues,” poor and working-class suburbs with high immigrant populations, as part of its bid for the Games, Stéphane Troussel, the president of Seine-Saint-Denis Departmental Council, told CNN.