Glistening buildings, crisp bed sheets and security worries: Inside Paris’

SAINT-DENIS, France — The beds for 10,000 Olympic contestants are already made and the gleaming athletes’ village has been delivered ahead of schedule, as Paris prepares for the world to descend upon its iconic boulevards this summer.

But security worries are hanging over this ambitious party, with organizers admitting this week that several countries are concerned about the Games’ grandiose opening ceremony, a 3.5-mile flotilla along the river Seine. 

Paris 2024 will be the first post-coronavirus lockdown Olympics, a coming out party for a global sporting festival whose last two outings, in Beijing and Tokyo, were heavily curtailed. 

“The athletes and everybody else are excited, especially after the pandemic,” Nicole Hoevertsz, International Olympic Committee vice president, told NBC News during a tour this week of the athletes  village in the northern Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis.

“The world needs this,” said Hoevertsz, an Aruban former synchronized swimmer who competed at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Today, she is chair of the IOC’s coordination commission for the 2028 Games in the Californian city. “We need to get people in a very peaceful atmosphere,” she said of this summer’s event, “instead of all the things that are happening around the world.”

Officials are portraying these as a pioneering Games, more environmentally conscious and sustainable than past iterations that were criticized for vast overspending and crumbling white-elephant arenas.

A little more than four months out, Paris is ahead of schedule and largely on budget, according to Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College in Massachusetts and a leading authority on Olympic finances.

That progress was evident this week during the tour of the Olympic village. (NBC News’ parent company, the Comcast-owned NBCUniversal, has paid $7.5 billion for U.S. Olympics media rights until 2032 and is the IOC’s largest single source of income.)

Stylish apartment blocks, clad in brick, wooden batons and bronze metals, line wide avenues of contemporary cobblestones. Nestled among these urban citadels were older industrial buildings, revitalized in a neighborhood that had fallen on hard times.

Inside the rooms, the cardboard, recyclable beds used in Tokyo are back. But air conditioning is eschewed here in favor of a geothermal cooling system — waiting to be tested against the city’s increasingly frequent summer heat waves.

This will become 2,800 homes, some of which will be social housing, when the 14,500 Olympic athletes and staff, and then 9,000 Paralympians, have left.

Officials say this will reinvigorate Seine-Saint-Denis, one of the most multicultural but also poorest parts of France. The term banlieue, as these working-class neighborhoods that encircle Paris are known, has become a pejorative in a country in which the ethnonationalist far right is surging amid mounting disillusionment with centrist President Emmanuel Macron.

But some Parisians are concerned that regeneration may, in fact, mean gentrification.

Organizers of the 2012 London Games had said that half of the 9,000 homes in its athletes village would be “affordable housing.” But the current number is just a fraction of that, while the citywide property and rental crisis in the British capital is worse than ever.

Paris ticket prices have also come under fire, the most expensive costing 990 euros (just more than $1,000). Renowned for being brusque at the best of times, some locals have expressed concern about the colossal security operation these Games will entail, necessary because of the unprecedented opening ceremony.

Organizers initially wanted to host 600,000 riverside spectators, most of them free tickets. But this week, they announced that these plans have been drastically scaled back, with the number of spectators cut in half and the only freebies by invitation only.

Officials did not detail their reasoning, but France remains on high alert following a wave of terror attacks in 2015-16 and sporadic stabbings and shootings by lone Islamist attackers since then. Police have been open about the challenges of protecting a flotilla through a dense urban area as opposed to a regular event in a single venue. It’s an operation that will see 45,000 security gendarmes and agents deployed to land, sea and air around the city.

NBC News asked Pierre-Olivier Beckers, chair of the International Olympic Committee Coordination Commission, whether any nations — namely the United States and Israel — have expressed concern about putting their athletes on these boats.

“This is something that is being…