Return to the Olympic Village one year later: far from the fervor of the Games, the ghost town awaits its future inhabitants

We had to search. Walk again and again around the 52 hectares of the neighborhood. Go up the few streets spared by the procession of barriers. Try to escape (in vain) the security guards by casually slipping into a hole. Lift our heads, look at the ground, chase from our nostalgic brains the images that come back to us as we walk. And in the end, be satisfied with not much – but which, after two hours of almost fruitless searching, seems like a treasure: here, behind the window of a ground floor, a paper pennant in the colors "Team Croatia"; there, a plastic bag with the logo of the games and the word " welcome"; there again, stickers with the flags of Azerbaijan remained stuck to the windows despite the major cleaning (further proof of the unparalleled know-how of the Azeris in matters of foreign interference?). finally, on the footbridge spanning a branch of the Seine, Olympic rings were placed there for lack of anything better in a future bus lane – before finding a permanent place for them...

It's hard to believe that this ghost town, straddling three communes of Seine-Saint-Denis (Saint-Denis, Saint-Ouen and L'Ile-Saint-Denis), was home to the Olympic Village a year ago, this gigantic phalanstery, as teeming as it was colorful, where the 14,000 athletes and coaches of the Games were housed. That the windows and balcony railings, now immaculate, offered a line of flags that would make vexillologists lose their heads (l…

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