Paris 2024: profitability after the Olympics, the challenge of the new Olympic Aquatic Center in Seine-Saint-Denis

An island in the middle of concrete. Like a kind of Atlantis, but hoping that this time it won’t be swallowed up. However, risks exist for the Olympic Aquatic Center, one of the rare infrastructures built for the Paris Games. With the Adidas Arena Porte de la Chapelle in Paris, the CAO was built, in Seine-Saint-Denis, to host events for the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Inaugurated Thursday April 4 by the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron, it will host the diving and swimming events there synchronizedover the two weeks of competition, as well as the preliminary phase of water polo, in the first week.

The CAO above all responds to an important need within Seine-Saint-Denis, the worst-off department in Ile-de-France in terms of swimming pools, with only 37 swimming pools for 1.6 million inhabitants. “As project owner, the Greater Paris Metropolis, (…) will leave a legacy to the city of Saint-Denis, the department of Seine-Saint-Denis and the entire Metropolis, rejoiced the president of the Metropolis Patrick Ollier in the press kit, dated March 2024. He was particularly pleased to have “an Olympic Aquatic Center of great modernity, with four pools of different sizes including one of variable size, which will be able to accommodate the French diving center and of exemplary modernity allowing it to accommodate, instantly, 3,850 people, from schoolchildren to the greatest competitors.”

The cost of this infrastructure, which also includes the pedestrian and cycle crossing of the A1 motorway thus linking the Olympic Aquatic Center to the Stade de France, amounts to 174.7 million euros. Fully public funding that got people talking. In the application file, the Olympic swimming pool was initially expected to cost less than 70 million euros, a cost refined to 90 million euros in the final project submitted in September 2017.