Paris (AFP)
To find some 400 million euros in savings, the organizers of the Paris-2024 Olympic Games are preparing to seriously alter the map of venues that will host the Olympic and Paralympic events.
The first tracks mentioned made the elected officials of Saint-Seine-Denis react, who fear being harmed, despite the promises of the organizing committee (COJO), for whom this department "will remain at the heart of the Games".
Review of the hotspots of the reflective map, which is due to be presented at a Paris-2024 executive bureau on Tuesday.
- Swimming goes west: from Saint-Denis to La Défense?
This was one of the great promises of the Paris-2024 candidacy: to build, in the poorest department in France, a large swimming pool in Saint-Denis, just in front of the Stade de France, for the swimming events.
But since the Olympic Games were awarded to Paris in September 2017, the project has multiplied the damage.
After an alert on possible additional costs in March 2018, the Olympic Aquatic Center (CAO), a long-lasting project and mainly the responsibility of public finances, was first resized to accommodate water polo and diving, while those swimming pools were promised to a temporary site, still in Saint-Denis but financed by private money from the OCOG and with the promise to relocate the three removable pools in Seine-Saint-Denis.
But since this summer, the idea has arisen to migrate the swimming events to the west of Paris, to La Défense Arena (Hauts-de-Seine), where the Racing rugby club operates.
Enough to make the new mayor of Saint-Denis Mathieu Hanotin jump, who sees a "queen" event of the Olympics going away.
The technical feasibility of the transfer to Defense Arena is under study and nothing has filtered out its financial gain compared to the previous hypothesis.
On the other hand, the cost of the CAO was nevertheless reassessed upwards at the end of last April, to 174.7 million euros against 113 according to a previous budget.
- Le Bourget, a reduced Olympic zone?
Originally, the Olympic area planned to spread over the municipalities of La Courneuve, Le Bourget and Dugny (Seine-Saint-Denis) was to be richly provided: three events (shooting, badminton, volleyball) and a village media promised to become a new district, a "21st century garden city" around the departmental park of Courneuve.
But here too, the project is unraveling to save money.
Initially, in June 2018, badminton was repatriated to Paris.
As for the media village, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Paris-2024 quickly questioned its need for the Olympics, while it was in the candidacy file.
The project is made more complicated by the delays in the delivery of lines 16 and 17 of the Grand Paris metro.
A second opinion is in progress on this specific subject of transport.
The media village, which must in particular be transformed into 1,300 housing units, will it be reduced?
Will it be "phased" as understood by several sources, that is to say a part built before 2024 and the other after?
And what about the equipment, schools, nurseries that must go with it?
As for the events, there is now talk of volleyball, which was to take place in a temporary facility, also leaves Le Bourget.
But this city could recover climbing, and eventually a lasting wall for this discipline.
- Horse riding in Versailles, "iconic" or bling-bling?
In Paris-2024, we are talking about an "iconic" choice and we do not seem to have decided to go back on it.
Like the Eiffel Tower (beach volleyball), the Grand Palais (fencing, taekwondo) or the Concorde (urban sports), the Palace of Versailles is one of the emblematic sites of the Parisian candidacy, likely to promise unique images for broadcasters and sponsors.
But in the weeks which followed the attribution of the Olympic Games in Paris, the French Equestrian Federation (FFE) did an about-face and protested against a choice "expensive" which leaves "no legacy".
"The choice of Versailles goes against all the work of modifying the image of horsemanship by suggesting that the appropriate framework is that of castles", wrote, more recently, the mayor of Lamotte- Beuvron (Loir-et-Cher), Pascal Bioulac, who defends the candidacy of the Federal Equestrian Park, the largest in Europe, located in his town and which hosts the French Open every year, the meeting place for equestrian clubs .
The cost of the provisional equipment at Versailles has been estimated at 27 million euros excluding tax, a figure considered underestimated by critics of the project.
© 2020 AFP