100% CSP is opening a series this Wednesday to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Beaublanc Sports Palace, in Limoges. The hall which has become legendary for French basketball was inaugurated on November 27, 1981. It was during a match against ASVEL.
In the minds of founding fathers, which were Jean-Claude Biojout and Xavier Popelier, the initial idea, with the Limoges CSP, is to move a city where many young people arrive following the creation of the hospital center. The club is so successful that you have to quickly find suitable equipment, rewinds Xavier Popalier: “A lot of young people arrived in Limoges and the idea came to us to develop basketball. It worked quite a bit at the beginning, but it arrived at a time when, playing in the municipal sports hall, we were filling up. the full was quickly done! It was getting dangerous. There were two solutions: either we stopped because we could no longer progress, or we found a solution. “
Convince Louis Longequeue, the mayor of Limoges
This solution is the creation of the Beaublanc Sports Palace. But we still have to convince the mayor. Popelier and Biojout then decide to invite him several times to the “mu room”, to show him how full it is, and potentially dangerous. “I approached Mr Longequeue by telling him: you should come and see the basketball a bit. I knew very well how it was going to happen, that he was going to be taken to task a little by people saying ‘We don’t can’t go back in! ”And that’s kind of what happened. He discovered a sport that attracted people and at the end, we said to him: Mr Mayor, we have to meet. There was Jean-Claude Biojout and me. Politely, we put the deal in hand. You saw what is going on. If you build us a Sports Palace, we are not opposed to continuing. “
I will build you your cathedral
The mayor finally gives his agreement. “I am taking the bet with you. I am going to build your cathedral for you, but I am asking you one thing: it will be necessary to increase to 5,000 people. Otherwise, it is me in the next elections who will defeat”, remembers Xavier Popelier.
The design is then entrusted, in 1977, to architects based in Limoges. Jean-Louis Roby, who also designed the Place Denis Dussoubs, was then very young in the profession: “I jumped on it, because it’s a project that fascinated me, of an exceptional dimension for a young archi!”
– Jerome Ostermann
Why this architecture?
At the time, the mayor’s command was to bring out of the ground, a Sports and Festival Palace he recalls, with a direct impact on the arrangement of the Beaublanc stands: “The objective is actor-spectator communication. The jubilation, the party. Everyone needs to see, that everyone is focused on what is happening in the middle. Hence the idea of a round shape, no blind spot. Indeed, it’s dizzying, but everything is dizzying here! Even the acoustics! “
Today, Beaublanc is aging. But the Sports Palace will be modernized with the objective of reaching 6,000 seats. But we will have to be patient, the city’s priority is to bring out training rooms for the CSP and Limoges Handball. The modernization of Beaublanc will occur in a second step, very probably after the next municipal elections.