AFP Videos – France
Paralympic Games: Paris is over
With a final “party” with electro sounds at the Stade de France, Paris definitively closes its first Paralympic Games on Sunday, hoping that they leave a legacy in terms of the way disability is viewed and taken into consideration. No fewer than 24 DJs from all generations, from Jean-Michel Jarre to Kavinsky, embodying the “French Touch” – the banner of French electro that is internationally recognized and exported en masse – will come to offer a final evening at the Stade de France, where around 60,000 spectators are expected from 8:30 p.m. and where some 4,400 para-athletes will parade one last time. The cauldron of the flame at the Tuileries will be extinguished and then “it will be a party”, promised artistic director Thomas Jolly. The Seine-Saint-Denis stadium will be transformed into a giant dancefloor for an hour of musical entertainment, around the theme “Paris is a party”. The torch will be passed to Los Angeles, which will host the next Olympic Games. and Paralympic Games in 2028. As the Paris-2024 chapter closes, France is still in the running to achieve its sporting objective of finishing in the Top 8 in the medal standings, before the final events on Sunday. As expected, para-cycling and para-swimming were by far the disciplines that provided the most medals for the Blues, with the victories of Marie Patouillet, Alexandre Léauté, Mathieu Bosredon, Florian Jouanny, Ugo Didier and Emeline Pierre, among others. On Saturday evening, the French blind football team made Paralympic history by winning gold for the first time on Saturday evening against Argentina. – China far ahead – As in Tokyo, China will finish on the top step of the medal table, far ahead of Great Britain and the United States. And these Paris Games will have highlighted several great champions, including China’s Yuyan Jiang and Belarus’ Ihar Boki in para-swimming, the two most decorated athletes in Paris with seven gold medals for one, five for the other. The enthusiasm for these Paralympic Games, the first on French soil, was generally there, despite the start of the school year interspersed between the two weeks of competition. Around 2.4 million tickets were sold or allocated on the eve of the closing ceremony out of 2.5 million put on sale last autumn. As a reminder, the record remains the London Games, with 2.7 million tickets sold. The popular sites of the Olympic Games, such as the Grand Palais or the Invalides, were once again appreciated and the para-athletes often raised the atmosphere on site. “The public was great, they carried me, it did me good and motivated me”, appreciated the French Julie Rigault-Chupin, however eliminated in the quarter-finals of the Open compound bow category in para archery. – “Awareness” – In terms of media coverage, 165 television channels followed the event, a record. Also a record for the number of delegations involved, 168. It remains to be seen whether the summer break will give way to a solid legacy in terms of taking into account the rights of people with disabilities, whether in accessibility, access to employment or sports practice. “We have not radically changed society, there is still a lot of work to do”, said Michael Jeremiasz, wheelchair tennis champion and head of mission of the French delegation, before the start of the Games. “But if we hadn’t had the Games, we wouldn’t have gained all this time, there has never been so much investment, awareness.” “My (work) will intensify on September 9, I will be there to ensure that this is only the beginning of an explosion of this awareness,” he promised. At the end of August, the president of the Île-de-France region, Valérie Pécresse, notably proposed a “metro for all” project, while the very old Parisian network is widely criticized for its lack of accessibility. A vast and costly project, the feasibility of which has yet to be discussed. lve-pbo/nip
