Paris 2024 Unveils Key Olympic Venue
With two weeks to go until the Summer Olympics, Paris 2024 unveiled the venue for handball, volleyball and table tennis competitions.
The temporary fields of play have been set up in the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles exhibition hall, south of Paris, and have been designed to be built and dismantled in record time.
The Arena Paris Sud, as it has been dubbed, is set to welcome up to 80,000 visitors per day, with four Olympic disciplines and three Paralympic events taking place there.
Built in 1923 to host the Paris Trade Fair, Paris Expo Porte de Versailles has been developed extensively over the years and welcomes 7.5 million visitors each year, particularly during the International Agricultural Show.
Paris 2024 General Manager, Etienne Thobois, saying: “Here, Porte de Versailles, is a key site for Paris 2024. We will have four Olympic sports, three Paralympic sports, up to 10 sessions per day, up to 80,000 spectators per day. Overall, this is where we will have the most sessions. More than 50 sessions will be organized on this site by Paris 2024 - more than a million spectators overall. It is one of the truly key sites of Paris 2024, with lots of activities and a magical experience for spectators.”
“The advantage of using these large exhibition halls is that they allow us not to build new sites and to use the existing ones, even if we set them up specifically for the Games," he added.
France will host the Olympic Games from July 26 to August 11.
Paris 2024 opening ceremony, set for July 26, will mark Paris' open door to millions of fans and thousands of athletes’ loved ones after they were virtually shut out of Tokyo in the summer of 2021 and Beijing in the winter of 2022.
