The city of Paris will have 28 festivities open to the public during the Olympic Games (OG) – which will be held from July 26 to August 11 – including the Trocadéro gardens and Parc de La Villette where medal-winning athletes will be celebrated, announced Tuesday April 23 at the Town Hall.
Free, these 26 fan zones will have on average “an instant capacity of 500 people” and will be open until 11 p.m., the end of the events. These will be broadcast live on giant screens, said Pierre Rabadan, deputy for sport and the Olympics, during a press conference at City Hall.
The Town Hall square, renamed “La Terrasse des Jeux”, due to a raised terrace that will be installed there, will be open continuously from July 14 and the passing of the Olympic flame. A day during which it will be able to accommodate 6,000 people. The rest of the time, there will be 2,500 people who will be able to enter at the same time to “follow the events, play sports, attend many cultural events”, summarizes the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo (Socialist Party).
All the arrondissements, except the 7th which “did not wish to organize one”, will have their site, specified the first deputy of the mayor, Emmanuel Grégoire, who anticipates the “biggest party in the history of Paris”. The three Paris Plages sites – quays of the Seine right bank, La Villette basin and Canal Saint-Martin – will also offer broadcasts, sporting and cultural events. The Rosa sur Seine barge of Rosa Bonheur, moored at Les Invalides, will host the “Pride House”, a fan zone dedicated to LGBTQ and their inclusion in sport.
A parade of medalists at the Trocadéro
Transformed into a “Champions Park” after the opening ceremony, the Trocadéro gardens will be the scene of a “parade of all the medalists from [the previous day]”, in front of 13,500 people, explained Martin Fourcade, president of the Paris 2024 Athletes’ Commission. This parade, which will bring together the medalists by discipline and not by delegation, will last one hour per day and will be “not a compulsory sequence” for the athletes, he told the Agency France Press.
However, “this is the only contact they will have with the public during the Games,” argued the five-time Olympic biathlon champion, who anticipates a “magical moment”. The same day as their medal, the athletes will go to the Parc de La Villette, transformed into a “Park of Nations” with the different national clubs.
Ahead of the Olympics, a “district Olympics” will give Parisians the opportunity to “measure themselves through sport,” explained Anne Hidalgo. The mayor still plans to swim in the Seine, before the Olympic events, during a “big dive” which will be organized during a “window around June 23, or the following week”.
