Made available to the Organizing Committee since last March, the Olympic Aquatic Center (CAO) was inaugurated Thursday by Emmanuel Macron. It will be open to the public in 2025 after legacy works.
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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.”
“A multi-sport dimension” to make the infrastructure profitable
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.
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To make the legacy CAO profitable, the Greater Paris Metropolis has focused on “multi-sport dimension of the equipment” in order to make “a place to live”. Its assets: three padel courts and three other 5-a-side football courts, a fitness room and a 1,000 m² climbing room. A catering area is also planned, as is a sports recycling center. If for the moment the place is reserved for hosting the Olympic Games, it will be transformed into its final version next October, before opening to the public in 2025.
A judicious model according to Virgile Caillet, expert in sports economics and general delegate of the Sport and Cycle Union. “If we only keep one pool, people will come and swim, and that’s it. We know that the price of entry to a swimming pool, which ranges between five and ten euros, is not elastic. We must therefore find other ways to invite people to stay, to consume and to make it a sporting destination.“he analyzes.
“With the other parallel activities, it almost becomes a sporting amusement park. We give it meaning outside of major competitions.”
Virgile Caillet, expert in sports economicsat franceinfo: sport
Above all, the project aims to be diversified, even though the aquatic center model is generally not profitable, “notably because there has been an explosion in energy costs, and on the volumes of water to heat and maintain temperature, it is very complicated to be in balance”, he insists again. Although it is still too early to judge the profitability of CAO, Virgile Caillet is confident. “The CAO was entrusted to a public service delegate, which is rather a guarantee of good management.” If the catering part remains the most profitable, “it only makes sense if you have just done an activity. It is difficult to separate the two”, decides the economic expert.
The CAO model is not unique in its kind, and is based on those implemented at the Aquaboulevard in Paris (attendance estimated at 4.35 million visitors per year in 2019 according to the consultation file produced in 2022), or at the Cercle des nageurs in Marseille for example. The latter, a private club made up of 4,000 members, welcomes high-level athletes and also offers additional activities, such as a fitness room, a pétanque court and a catering area. With an attendance of nearly 300,000 entries per year, Paul Leccia, its president, recognizes “that there are only expenses and the deficit. Our budget is based on revenue from subscriptions (1,700 euros per year, and 2,300 euros in admission fees), a few meager subsidies and sponsorship.” But he defends this issue of living space, essential to the viability of the club.
Activities that are on the rise
A good point is also given for the chosen activities, according to Virgile Caillet. “In Ile-de-France, there are few offers of padel compared to the demand. By betting on this sport, there is no risk of making a mistake. It is an activity which still has very beautiful days ahead of her, like climbing elsewhere”, notes this specialist. This multi-sport offering also makes it possible to attract a varied audience; the swimming pool on one side with a universal and intergenerational audience, and another younger one with new sports. “These multi-activity centers meet the expectations and aspirations of the millennial generation, aged 20 to 35, who want to practice an activity in a pleasant context, when, where and with whom they want”underlines Virgile Caillet.
“This also responds to a phenomenon that we see in studies: we are no longer athletes of just one sport. Today, it is estimated that a French person who engages in regular physical activity will practice four different activities. “
Virgile Caillet, expert in sports economicsat franceinfo: sport
Above all, the objective was to prevent the CAO from becoming a white elephant, in other words a prestigious achievement that turned out to be more costly than beneficial. “It was all the difficulty of having equipment with ambitious standards within the framework of the Olympics, and which the department needed, but while being sized from an economic and reasonable point of view”, raises Virgile Caillet.
The capacity of the stands also follows this logic. “Building a facility for 15,000 seats would have been criticized, with the argument that it would never have been used to its full capacity. The choice was to install 5,000 seats. The approach of saying: ‘We are taking advantage of the Games to having an Olympic tool, while being reasoned on an economic level was the right thing'”, he believes. Thanks to this new Olympic Aquatic Center, France will also be able to host the European swimming championships again, from 2026. France has not organized them since 1987, in Strasbourg.