Saunas, cold baths, medical team available, specific gyms… Three minutes from the Olympic Village, the Maison de la Performance which opened on Monday evening offers a range of equipment and services for French athletes, pampered for their Olympic Games (JO) at home.
It took imagination a few years ago to visualize what the Marcel Cachin vocational high school, which adjoins the Olympic Village on the Saint-Ouen side, would become. And the result is rather impressive.
The weight rooms, the archery area, the dojo for judokas, the boxing room, the fencers’ tracks, the 3×3 outdoor basketball court, etc. were designed with the materials and floors that athletes will find competing on the Olympic sites.
In total, almost 9,000 m2 were set up in this high school, for a budget of 4.5 million euros (more than 6.7 million Canadian dollars), with the aim of providing athletes with the famous “marginal gains”, those little things which, when added together, can make a difference.
“We’ve been working on it for over two years,” said Yann Cucherat, head of the Gagner structure in France, during a visit with several media outlets a few hours before the site opened and four days before the opening ceremony of the Games.
You only have to wander through this maze of rooms and corridors, which are typical of a new generation high school, and push open each door to see the work that has been accomplished.
“Before it was the canteen”
“This used to be the canteen,” explains one of the managers, Yannick Szczepaniak, as we enter what will be a lounge reserved for athletes for two weeks, with armchairs, sofas, a large-screen TV on the wall and a bar. In the Documentation and Information Centre (CDI), upstairs, massage tables have been lined up, separated by curtains, with an ultrasound room.
“It really looks good, it’s well done, there’s nothing to say,” a source within the French Olympic movement who visited the complex on Monday along with several media outlets told AFP.
About 250 people are expected to pass through the house every day during the Olympics, officials said.
Designed by the National Sports Agency (ANS), thought up by its high performance manager Claude Onesta, the place is supposed to provide athletes with a multitude of little things that they normally don’t have during the Olympics: a less stressful atmosphere than in the village, flexible access to the training rooms and the presence of members of their staff who have not been accredited for the village.
“The interest of the “perf” house is to have non-accredited staff. We will recover here members of the staff who are used to working with the athletes. Whether it is for physical preparation, mental preparation, care, physiotherapists”, assures Claude Onesta.
“This place is supposed to respond to all those little details that come to pollute your life when you are in the Olympic Village,” summarizes the head of high-level sport.
Top 5
“Everyone we welcome here can come and train at the time they want,” explains Yann Cucherat. And get away from the constraints inherent to life in the village. “They come when they want and as much as they want. Whereas in an Olympic Village, there are often sessions of one hour, one hour and a half, it depends on the disciplines. And then, they throw you out because the other nation is arriving. So there, they can be at peace,” he explains.
The idea was born from the English during the London Olympics in 2012, taken up by the Japanese three years ago in Tokyo where the French wanted to set up their own structure, prevented by COVID-19.
By Yann Cucherat’s admission, this French “house of “performance”” has no real equivalent in what he has been able to observe. A tool that should normally help France achieve its goal of finishing in the top 5 at the end of its Olympic Games.