2023-12-31 12:00:04
The athletes’ village, Quinconces sector (Seine-Saint-Denis), December 16, 2023 CHRISTOPHE CAUDROY FOR “THE WORLD”
One man enjoyed this meeting more than the others on Tuesday December 19, in the heart of the Olympic and Paralympic village for the Paris 2024 Games, a stone’s throw from the Stade de France, in Seine-Saint-Denis. We were twelve days away from December 31, 2023, the “pivot date” that Nicolas Ferrand had set for himself six years earlier, when he took the helm of Solideo, the company created to build or renovate in record time the equipment necessary for the competition.
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Among the big pieces: the athletes’ village (14,250 beds), the media village, an aquatic center, a 9,000-seat hall. “In January 2018, the general opinion was to say that we would not succeed. The Greater Paris metro had difficulty getting out, EuropaCity (the megacomplex imagined in the fields south of Roissy) was not coming out. » But there, the deadline, “overall, we hold it”, announced the engineer proudly, even with emotion, during his annual update – and therefore the last – on the progress of the construction sites.
At the start of 2024, there remain three tense files, but 84% of the work has been delivered. ” What matters “remember moreover Nicolas Ferrand, who experienced some scares with the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the June riots, “it’s the transmission of the keys at the end of February, beginning of March to Cojop [comité d’organisation des Jeux] ».
Satisfied
Before Christmas, the sounds of a drill still echoed in the streets of the Olympic village, this piece of city that rose from the ground in “less than three years” north of the capital, straddling three municipalities (Saint-Denis, Saint-Ouen, Ile-Saint-Denis). Trucks were still delivering some of the 9,000 shrubs or trees which should, between now and summer, bring a little green to this set of around fifty hectares which is still very mineral, but overall the main thing was coming to an end.
In January, the reservation period opens. The companies have two months to carry out the alterations, before handing over the keys to Cojop at the beginning of March, which will then furnish the interiors. The Olympic square, the future meeting place for athletes with their families and the press, now has a helical ramp which connects the central mall of the village to the banks of the Seine, which have been redeveloped to make walking easier.
It is opposite, on Île-Saint-Denis, that three buildings (500 beds) will be delivered late – “ during March “ – due to concerns about the structural work. And since the tone is satisfactory, Nicolas Ferrand recalls that “2,200 VSEs and SMEs, from 86 departments worked” on the showcase site. “All of France therefore built the Olympic village. »
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