A striking contrast. A few hours after the very cautious words of Belgian Pierre-Olivier Beckers, chairman of the Paris 2024 Games Coordination Commission, the capital’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo (pictured above), assured us on Tuesday June 6 that the city was “ready“. No less so. “Yes, we’re ready, she declared on France Inter. With a year to go before the Games, people are generally stressed and say they’re not going to make it. But we’re within budget and we’re on schedule.” The day before, Pierre-Olivier Beckers had given a very different, even opposing, speech at the opening of the penultimate meeting of the IOC Coordination Commission. He explained that the OCOG still had “a lot of work to do“, and predicted that the work would be “tense right to the end” on the budgetary front. On France Inter, Anne Hidalgo also defended the Organizing Committee’s pricing policy for Olympic Games tickets, highlighting “an economic model where 50% of tickets are sold for less than 50 euros“.
