The nine men and nine women, who will serve as volunteers, have been tasked specifically with three missions: to engage the public; to enhance athletes’ experience of the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games; and to draw up a plan to involve more athletes in the project.

"It is a big honour to be asked," says Jessica Harrison, a United Kingdom-born triathlete who competed for France at the 2008 and 2012 Olympics in Beijing and London respectively and who is one of the 18 Athletes’ Commission members.

These are still relatively early days for Paris 2024, but Estanguet, a former canoeist, is said to have wanted to get the Commission swiftly set up to underline how athletes are at the heart of the project, just as they played a prominent role in the French capital’s successful bid.

Officials insist that the Paris 2024 Athletes’ Commission will be able to take real decisions and is not just window dressing.

Harrison - who was among the athletes involved in the bid and who sits on the Athletes’ Committee of her own sport’s governing body, the International Triathlon Union – regards the development of sport and development of the area around the future Athletes’ Village as "pretty important socially and economically".

"It is such an important thing to take care of, and to build up, your community," she says, adding that Saint-Denis is "an area that needs investment".

By way of example, she points out that there is a major road between the Stade de France and the Village site.

"A very important thing," she says, "is to build bridges, especially pedestrian bridges, across roads.

"It can really connect a community in a concrete way.

"The Games gives impetus to make those things happen."

She also recalls the "transformative" effect of the 2012 Olympics on the atmosphere in London, speaking of how, being British as well as French, "I would love that to happen in Paris".

Harrison, 40, is a walking, talking embodiment of the Entente Cordiale.

Having studied sports science at Loughborough University, she decided she wanted to be a full-time triathlete and realised that the south of France was "a great base".

She went to Perpignan and "ended up staying", explaining: "After five years, you can ask for naturalisation – and here I am."

It might all have been very different had it not been for her mother’s dislike of flying, which meant that family holidays tended to be taken in nearby France.

She also had an early immersion in French culture when her parents sent her on a six-month exchange visit to Normandy as a nine-year-old.

She says members of the French family with whom she stayed came to watch her at London 2012.