Paris Is Utopia for Paralympians Until They Leave the Athletes’ Village

To many of the athletes arriving at the 2024 Paralympic Games in Paris, the part of the city designed specifically for them amounted to something of a utopia.

The Paralympic Village had plenty of adaptive scooters that, when latched onto the front of a wheelchair, help it easily navigate the athletes’ mini-city, which is situated in the hilly exurbs of northern Paris. Tri-level water fountains had spouts at standing height, wheelchair level and ground level — for guide dogs. Every shower in the athlete housing complex could be rolled into. Even the T-shirt racks in the official merchandise store could be reached from a seated position.

“It’s the place in the world where I feel the least disabled,” Birgit Skarstein, a Norwegian para rower, said. She added: “I don’t have to go on Google Maps and zoom to see if there are stairs wherever I’m going, you know, to plan. I don’t need to figure out whether I can go to the toilet, because I know. And if the world could be like a Paralympic Village, it would be better for all of us.”

But never mind the world — even the rest of Paris is not like its Paralympic Village. Though the city made extensive improvements in the years leading up to the Games, it will be decades before its cobbled streets, narrow sidewalks and small parks achieve even a semblance of the Village’s accessibility.

Paris’s 124-year-old Metro system poses the largest challenge. Despite the considerable investment in infrastructure made since 2017, when the city won its Olympic bid, only 25 percent of the rail network that travels to central Paris — including the Metro, express rail and trams — is accessible to people with disabilities. And only one Metro line, its newest, is fully accessible to those who use wheelchairs.

“Just to make sure we become full-rights citizens — that’s the whole challenge and the whole idea of the Games,” said Michaël Jérémiasz, a former wheelchair tennis player and member of the Athletes Council who advised the Games’ organizers. “So we’ll measure all this in probably five, six, seven years. That’s where we can really measure the impact of the Games. Before that, that’s not something we’ll feel probably in real life.”