France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, promised to build the Summer Olympics safely, free of the construction hazards and migrant worker abuses that tarnished soccer’s 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
Months before the Games begin in Paris, he declared success.
“We are living up to the commitments we made,” Mr. Macron said in February.
Government data shows fewer than 200 injuries at Olympics sites over a four-year construction blitz. And no deaths.
But inspection records and other documents show that Olympics sites have been more dangerous than organizers have let on, with some projects failing to meet basic safety standards. When undocumented immigrants are hurt on the job, workers and officials say, the injuries are often handled off the books, all but guaranteeing that they will not show up in government statistics.
Even fatal accidents of laborers working legally are sometimes omitted from the Olympic count.
When two workers died on a subway project that Mr. Macron’s former transportation minister called “the lifeline of the Olympics,” their deaths were not included in the Olympic total.
When a truck fatally crushed a man who was helping build a wastewater basin to allow swimming events to be held in the Seine, his death was omitted from the Olympic count. “Administratively, it was put in another category,” said Paul Duphil, the executive secretary of France’s quasi-government construction safety watchdog.
