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It was a sunny morning in mid-June and the athletes’ village for the Summer Olympics, in Seine-Saint-Denis, just outside Paris, was still nominally under construction.
那是六月中旬的一个晴朗早晨，位于巴黎郊外塞纳-圣但尼的夏季奥运会奥运村据说是仍在建设中。
Workers sweated in hard hats and yellow vests, watching over the empty site.
工人们热得冒汗，戴着安全帽，穿着黄色背心，看管着这个空旷的工地。
Built in the midst of various housing developments, the village sprawls across 128 riverine acres. Luc Besson’s former film studio complex, in a converted power plant, has been partly turned into the athletes’ mess hall.
奥运村建于众多住宅开发区之中，横跨128英亩河边土地。吕克·贝松之前的电影工作室大楼位于一座经过改造的发电厂内，现在部分已被改造成运动员食堂。
Next door, another power plant, gut renovated and whitewashed, which now houses a gym, will become office space for 2,500 civil servants in France’s Ministry of the Interior after the Games are done.
隔壁的另一座发电厂从内到外彻底翻新和粉刷，现在里面有一个健身房，奥运会结束后，它将成为法国内政部2500名公务员的办公楼。
Every couple of years, when another Olympics rolls around, a familiar story is recycled: The Games are a way for host cities to fast-track infrastructure and urban-redevelopment projects.
每隔几年，当新一届奥运会来临时，一个熟悉的故事就会重新被讲述：奥运会是主办城市快速推进基础设施建设和城市再开发项目的一种方式。
But there is surprisingly little evidence to back this story up and examples galore suggesting the reverse.
但令人惊讶的是，几乎没有证据能证明这个故事，反而有大量的例子表明情况恰恰相反。
Athens, which splurged on white elephant arenas in 2004 for sports that few Greeks play, stirred a rush of national pride but incurred debts that helped fuel an economic meltdown with ripple effects across Europe.
雅典在2004年为了举办一些没有多少希腊人参加的体育赛事而大肆挥霍，建造了很多华而不实的场馆，这激发了一阵民族自豪感，但也造成了巨额债务，促使经济崩溃，并在整个欧洲引发了连锁反应。
So dubious have the outcomes been for host cities that some experts argue New York actually won the competition to host the 2012 Summer Games because it lost out to London.
奥运会给主办城市带来的结果如此可疑，以至于一些专家认为，纽约实际赢得了2012年夏季奥运会主办权的竞争，因为它输给了伦敦。
In preparing the city’s bid, a team headed by a New York deputy mayor mapped sites that could be converted into parks, housing and office towers after the Olympics.
在筹备纽约市申奥工作时，由纽约副市长牵头的一个团队绘制了一些地点的地图，这些地点在奥运会结束后可以改造成公园、住房和办公大楼。
When London won the Games, New York more or less went ahead with its plans anyway, rejuvenating large swaths of waterfront without having to divert billions of dollars toward a short-lived sporting event in the teeth of what turned out to be a global recession.
伦敦赢得奥运会主办权后，纽约或多或少还是继续推行了这个计划，无需顶着经济压力，把数十亿美元投入一场短暂的体育赛事，就让大片滨水区重焕活力，后来证明当时的经济压力就是全球经济衰退。
During a different era — before the costs of staging the Olympics rose to the G.D.P. of certain medium-size nations and the dream of promoting world harmony through athletics was shattered by a string of terrorist attacks, doping scandals, boycotts and bombings — postwar cities like Rome (1960) and Tokyo (1964) used the event as coming-out parties for their new economies and societies.
在一个不同的时代——在举办奥运会的成本还没有达到一些中等规模国家GDP的水平，以及通过体育促进世界和谐的梦想还没有被一系列恐怖袭击（1972年慕尼黑）、兴奋剂丑闻（各届奥运会任君挑选）、抵制（1980年莫斯科、1984年洛杉矶）和爆炸事件（1996年亚特兰大）所粉碎时——战后的城市，如罗马（1960年）和东京（1964年），将奥运会作为其新经济和新社会的亮相派对。
