Two years on, Paris 2024 is part of everyday life in the French capital
Two years after the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, their legacy is visible throughout Parisian daily life: the Seine has been reopened for swimming, Paris has become a more accessible and cyclable city, sport has been written into the French school curriculum, and major investments continue to transform communities that needed them most.
Key facts
- Two years after Paris 2024, the Games' legacy is visible across everyday life in the French capital.
- The Seine is open for public swimming again after a century-long ban.
- The Games accelerated the transformation of Seine-Saint-Denis, with new housing, transport links and sports facilities.
- The Games have boosted sports participation, accessibility and the Île-de-France economy.
Paris 2024 was designed above all for the people who call it home, with benefits intended to last long after the Olympic flame was extinguished.
Today, those benefits can be seen across the French capital and beyond.
Games wide open. Designed to last
True to its motto, "Games Wide Open", Paris 2024 offered the first Games fully aligned with the IOC’s Olympic Agenda reforms, which aimed to make the Games more inclusive, more sustainable and better adapted to the long-term needs of host communities.
Ninety-five per cent of competition venues were existing or temporary; renewables supplied 98.4 per cent of Games-time electricity; carbon emissions were 54.6 per cent below the London 2012-Rio 2016 average; and 90 per cent of equipment and materials were rented, reused or repurposed.
The Games also accelerated changes that continue to shape the city. Sixty kilometres of Games-era cycle routes became permanent; accessibility is now a standard consideration in urban planning and major events; and wheelchair-accessible transport has been expanded, including a fourfold increase in accessible taxis.
A river returned to its people
Perhaps nowhere is the legacy of Paris 2024 more visible than in the Seine.
This summer, as Paris faces record-breaking temperatures, residents are once again swimming in the river at three free supervised bathing sites after the lifting of a century-old ban. Almost 100,000 people took to the water during the first season last year.
The Games helped accelerate a decades-long effort to clean up the river. This included upgrades to wastewater treatment plants, the removal of thousands of faulty sewer connections and the construction of the Austerlitz stormwater basin, which can store the equivalent of 20 Olympic swimming pools of water during heavy rainfall.
By 2024, 36 species of fish had been recorded in the Seine, compared with just two in 1984.
“Cleaning up the Seine was a project Paris had dreamed of for decades – and people sometimes forget it was never only about swimming,” says Pierre Rabadan, Paris’s Deputy Mayor for Sport and the Olympic Games at the time of the Games, and currently in charge of Tourism and Nightlife. “Without the momentum and the enthusiasm of the Games, we would never have got there so fast: we gained 20 years. Today Parisians have their river back, and you can feel how much that has changed the way the city lives with it.”
Seine-Saint-Denis at the heart of the project
Seine-Saint-Denis, one of France’s youngest, most diverse and most disadvantaged departments, was placed at the heart of the project from the outset, and is where many of the Games' most visible benefits can be found today.
The Olympic Aquatics Centre opened to the public in 2025, bringing much-needed swimming facilities to an area long underserved by sports infrastructure.
Nearby, the former Olympic Village is being transformed into a climate-adapted neighbourhood powered by renewable energy. In time, around 6,000 residents, including many in social housing, will live alongside schools, childcare facilities, offices and green spaces connected to the Saint-Denis Pleyel transport hub.
Making Seine-Saint-Denis the beneficiary of the Games is already reality. In a territory that had long lacked places to swim, families now have their pools. And the Village has quite simply become a neighbourhood where people want to live.
For the IOC, the transformation of Seine-Saint-Denis forms part of a broader Paris 2024 legacy across the city and its people.
“Paris 2024 showed what is possible when the Games are designed around the long-term needs of a city and its people,” said Christophe Dubi, IOC Executive Director, Olympic Games. “Legacy was not an afterthought; it was built into the project from day one. The result is that, two years later, the Games are still delivering benefits - from a cleaner Seine and new neighbourhoods to greater access to sport and more inclusive public spaces. That is exactly the kind of impact the IOC’s Olympic Agenda reforms were intended to achieve.”
A nation moving, an economy lifted
The Games also set out to get France moving: sport is now more deeply embedded in the school day; free swimming schemes have taught tens of thousands of children; and Olympic and Paralympic Week has reached more than five million pupils since 2017, and will continue as France prepares for the Alpes 2030 Olympic Winter Games.
In Paris, 38 Games-born social sport programmes – from women-only sessions on public courts to new club sections for athletes with disabilities – reach some 50,000 people a year. Since the Games, eight in ten French people report exercising weekly.
The economic impact is also expected to endure. The Organising Committee closed with a EUR 76 million surplus, while an independent study projects a net contribution to the Île-de-France economy of between EUR 6.7 billion and 11.1 billion by 2034.
“The greatest legacy of Paris 2024 is the one you cannot photograph,” says Rabadan. “For a few weeks, an entire country lived a moment of collective pride and happiness. And because legacy was thought through, planned and funded from the very first day, that moment didn’t end with the Closing Ceremony.”
An Olympic experience to build on
Beyond the physical, social and economic transformations, Paris 2024 also left a legacy that is harder to measure but central to its impact: the way it immersed the Games in the city and placed athletes at the heart of a shared celebration.
What made Paris 2024 so special was that it was always about sport, but more than sport. It was a complete immersion into the city through sport - a celebration of culture, heritage and community, with the athletes always front and centre. From the banks of the Seine to some of the world’s most iconic landmarks, the Games created a connection between people, place and performance that resonated far beyond the field of play. That spirit will endure as one of the defining legacies of Paris 2024 and an inspiration for future host cities.
A flame that rises again
The Olympic cauldron never really left Paris. Since 21 June, it has again risen each evening over the Tuileries Gardens, its flame reborn as a halo of water mist and light on a tethered balloon. It will fly nightly until 14 September. It is now a fixture of the Parisian summer: last year's season alone drew 2.5 million visitors, proof of how deeply the city has taken the Games, and their symbols, to heart.