Housing, museum, prison: the metamorphoses of the Olympic villages

Like the tents of Olympia under which the athletes of the ancient Games slept, the athletes of the modern era initially had to be content with Spartan living conditions.

In Antwerp in 1920, the American delegation was housed aboard an old, unsanitary warship. In Paris in 1924, the Olympic village was ephemeral, with around sixty wooden barracks erected near the Colombes stadium and then dismantled.

It was not until Los Angeles in 1932 that the first official village emerged with around a hundred homes accommodating 2.000 athletes. But under the effect of the Great Depression, everything was dismantled and the materials recovered or resold.

All the Games will now have their village, except those of 1948 held in a devastated city of London at the end of the Second World War.

After each Olympics, the vast majority of villages become residential neighborhoods, often welcoming students or modest households.

In Melbourne in 1956, some 4.000 disadvantaged families settled in the Heidelberg district.

After the Grenoble Winter Games in 1968, the district which welcomed the athletes retained its name "Villeneuve-Olympic Village". His rehabilitation, however, did not have the expected success, and he became one of the poorest in the city.

Controversy after Lake Placid

In a 2011 study, the East Thames Group real estate group highlighted the "degraded" and "environmentally unfriendly" construction of the 2004 Athens Games village.

The economic context weighs heavily. The financial crisis left the Turin 2006 Winter Games village in a state of virtual abandonment. Apartments in the former 2016 Rio Games village have barely found takers due to soaring market prices.

As early as 1996, a symposium organized by the IOC on "Olympic Villages, a hundred years of urban planning and shared experiences" invited the host cities to "a realistic assessment of the demand for this type of accommodation" in order to avoid their “underutilization”.

But it was another use of Olympic facilities that sparked global controversy in Lake Placid in 1980 when the two Winter Games villages were transformed into prisons.

Despite a mobilization initiated by the “Stop the Olympic Prison” group, the Federal Ray Brook Correctional Facility in New York State opens its doors. At the entrance, the only vestige of the Olympic adventure is a flagpole which carried the flags of the participating nations.

A place of memory, the village of the 1936 Games in Berlin, used for propaganda purposes by the Nazi regime, has been classified as a historic monument and has hosted an open-air museum since 2004.

The Munich Olympic Village, scene in 1972 of a bloody hostage-taking of Israeli athletes by a Palestinian commando (eleven athletes and a police officer killed), houses a memorial dedicated to the victims.

Finally in Sarajevo, the residential area resulting from the 1984 Winter Games was destroyed in April 1992 during the Bosnian War. Its reconstruction, supported by Barcelona, ​​host city of the 1992 Games, was completed in 1999.