Paris, host city of the 2024 Olympics, suffering on its sports equipment

A new football pitch that "tore apart", toilets out of service for months, an athletics track in "catastrophic" condition: two years before the 2024 Olympics (July 26-August 11, 2024), the examples abound of poor workmanship or poor maintenance of Parisian sports facilities.

On the football pitch of the Poterne des Peupliers (XNUMXth arrondissement), "dangerous holes and hollows" caused four ruptures of the cruciate ligaments last season in players from the Entente Sportive Paris XIII, according to a club official, Pedro Sobral.

And when the swimming pools are not being worked on, the slow strikes by agents opposed to the application of the 35-hour week can lead to their unexpected closure, including in this scorching summer.

Another subject of tension, the "lack of slots for associations", regrets Samia Badat-Karam, vice-president (LR and related) of the sport and Olympics commission at the Council of Paris. "It's terrible, we have associations that we refuse all the time," said this elected representative of the XNUMXth arrondissement.

Pedro Sobral wonders "about the criteria for allocating" slots and denounces an "injustice": according to him, some associations have "more facilities" to obtain them.

Accelerated aging

An observation put into perspective by Gérald Reman, president of the volleyball association Contrepied, for whom the town hall "does the best" and "always finds solutions" for clubs "very demanding" of slots like his (380 members).

At the start of the season, however, he had to refuse a hundred membership requests for lack of training places.

Between health crisis and budgetary difficulties, the City has taken "a lot of delay on all the achievements, even on the small local equipment that should be taken out for the Games", deplores the boss of elected communist Nicolas Bonnet-Oulaldj.

For him, the "legacy" of Paris-2024 would be "that there are more Parisians who practice sport after the Games". But "we are unable to meet all the requests and all the needs" in the swimming pools, he is alarmed.

Paris "lacks sports equipment" for its 2,1 million inhabitants, readily admits the sports and Olympics assistant Pierre Rabadan, who underlines the renovation and investment effort since the arrival of mayor Anne Hidalgo in 2014: 400 million euros, including 150 for swimming pools.

The National Institute of Youth and Popular Education (Injep) makes a link between strong urbanization and the scarcity of sports equipment, in Paris (14 equipment for 10.000 inhabitants), in the Bouches-du-Rhône (27) or the Rhone (29).

A vicious circle for the capital, since gymnasiums, stadiums and swimming pools "are overused and age more quickly", notes Pierre Rabadan, whose agents must constantly play tightrope walkers, especially during renovations.

Example with the swimming pools, of which 6 out of 42 are currently undergoing major renovations.

This "huge investment plan" for the Olympics has the negative effect of "blocking the pools during the works", notes Olivier Hosatte, president of the water polo club La Libellule.

The ring road, an opportunity?

The teams of the Youth and Sports Department must better "think about the different sports activities when designing the pool", laments the polo player.

His club was allocated a slot in one of the two new swimming pools inaugurated at the start of 2020, before being banned from playing ball there due to "fragile lights at the edge of the pool"...

Anne Hidalgo's executive promises a third new swimming pool at the end of 2024 in the XNUMXth arrondissement, while two others are under consideration, says public construction assistant Jacques Baudrier.

The only Olympic site built for the intramural Games, the Porte de La Chapelle Arena (10.000th century) will have two annexed gymnasiums, while a 2 mXNUMX sports city is planned in Python-Duvernois (XNUMXth century), according to Mr. Harness.

In a city where the smallest square meter is coveted, "the basic problem is still the available land and the Games are not going to revolutionize that", warns Mr. Rabadan.

The ex-rugby player wants to believe in the "land opportunities" that the transformation of the ring road into an urban boulevard, by 2030, could offer sports structures.

Until then, he sees only three levers for the City: "optimization of the use of slots", the sharing of equipment in other Ile-de-France municipalities and "better exploitation of the Bois de Boulogne and Vincennes" , providers of many outdoor terrains.