Exclusive-Paris has a lot to gain from hosting the Games, says mayor

PARIS : The 2024 Olympics have allowed Paris and its region to speed up plans to extend their public transport network and other big projects such as cleaning up the Seine river, mayor Anne Hidalgo said on Wednesday.

Just over four months before the Games open on July 26, Paris brims with calls for strike around the event and with grumbling over overcrowded metro, and there is little public display of enthusiasm for the event.

But Paris' Socialist mayor argues there is much to win for the city's inhabitants - and the wider region's poorer neighbourhoods.

"The question was 'are we going to win and do we need it?'," said Hidalgo, who needed convincing before getting embarked into the Paris bid in 2015 after the city lost to London for the 2012 Games.

"So what was missing in Paris? Well, its relationship with its neighbours, which could be improved by the main impact of the Games on Seine-Saint-Denis," she told Reuters, referring to the underprivileged department just outside Paris, which she said will benefit from better infrastructure.

Hidalgo said that the north east of Paris will reap benefits from the Games, with the newly built Adidas Arena in the Porte de la Chapelle area while the Eiffel Tower zone will be renovated with the Pont d'Iena being closed to traffic.

The Place de la Concorde will also be partly closed to traffic and the River Seine will be suitable for bathing, she said, despite recent mishaps over sewer problems.

"Without the Games, I would have needed an extra 10 years" to make these transformations, she said.

"For me, it (preparing for the Olympics) was clearly an acceleration of the transformation of Paris, of the ecological transformation of Paris in terms of mobility, of swimming in the Seine, which I