Honor to seniors: the legendary Yves-du-Manoir stadium in Colombes, northwest of Paris, is the first site delivered for the Olympic Games, where field hockey tournaments are planned, a century after being at the heart of the 1924 Olympic Games.
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Located between 15-story buildings and a highway, the Yves-du-Manoir stadium in Colombes was a timeless place which has preserved a small building nicknamed “weighing machine”, a relic of what was also a racecourse at the beginning of the 20th century .
The speaker has been given a facelift. After two years of work, the key to the new complex was symbolically handed over on Monday December 18 to the owner, the Hauts-de-Seine departmental council.
The final budget of 101 million euros – compared to 94 million estimated at the start of the work – enabled the upgrading of the historic stand, with a capacity of 6,000 seats, and the construction of a new stand separate from 1,000 places, as well as a large changing room and office building.
World Cup Final
During the Olympic Games (July 26 – August 11), the two stands, reinforced by temporary stands, will each overlook a field hockey competition field.
These temporary stands, which will be installed between February and April, will bring the total to 13,500 seats, specified Édouard Donnelly, executive director of operations of the organizing committee (Cojo), who expects “300,000 spectators over the fortnight” of days of competition.
With 12 teams per tournament – men’s and women’s – around 400 athletes from this sport “very popular in India, the most populous country in the world”, will come to compete in Colombes, which will make it a “very important site beyond its historical aspect”, underlined Édouard Donnelly.
Because Yves-du-Manoir, which bears the name of a rugby player from the Racing Club de France, the stadium’s historic club, who died in 1928 at the controls of his plane, is first and foremost a legendary place in French sport and the main venue for the 1924 Olympic Games.
The stadium was then the setting for the epic races of British athletes Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell, immortalized in the four-Oscar winning film “Chariots of Fire” (1981) with music by Vangelis.
Enlarged just before the Second World War to accommodate 60,000 spectators and host the final of the 1938 World Cup, it saw 42 Coupe de France finals and 79 matches of the French football team played.
But the inauguration in 1972 of the new version of the Parc des Princes marked its decline and three of its four stands were razed at the end of the 20th century.
At the end of the 2000s, the return to the forefront of Racing had raised hopes of a new large-scale project, but the rugby club ultimately opted for the construction of a closed multi-purpose hall, La Défense Arena .
Paris-2024 “on time”
Yves-du-Manoir “needed work. The Olympics were an opportunity to completely renovate this stadium”, recalled the president of the departmental council Georges Siffredi, “proud and happy” that the stadium met “a new Olympic destiny” .
And that the heterogeneous ensemble, which will become after the Games the headquarters of the French Hockey Federation, while retaining its football and rugby activities, is the “first equipment of the Olympic Games to be delivered on time, but also with a small little advance.”
“All the sites are on schedule and will be inaugurated little by little in the first quarter of 2024,” assured Édouard Donnelly for Cojo.
Of the three main Olympic works delivered by Solideo (Olympic works delivery company) for the Paris Olympics, the Porte de la Chapelle Arena must be the first delivered, in January 2024, a few months late.
The handover of the keys to the Olympic Village must take place at the end of February. As for the Olympic Aquatic Center (CAO), Solideo is now counting on the end of March.
With AFP