The City Hall Presents the Carioca Arena 1 at the Rio 2016 Olympic Park

After the Future Arena and the International Broadcast Center (IBC), another venue’s construction at the Rio 2016 Olympic Park reaches its end. Rio City Hall introduced this afternoon the Carioca Arena 1, the setting where the basketball, wheelchair basketball and wheelchair rugby’s competitions will take place.

Part of the Public-Private Partnership that made the Olympic Park feasible, the Carioca Arena 1 was built by the City Hall through the Rio Mais Consortium. The International Female Basketball Tournament will happen there starting on Friday 15 – a test-event gathering 48 athletes from four countries (Brazil, Australia, Venezuela and Argentina). It will be the second test-event at the Rio 2016 Olympic Park, after the tennis tournament that took place last December. Another test-event in February – the International Wheelchair Rugby Championship – will light up the Arena before the Games start in August.

A 38,000m2, 33-meter high building, the Carioca Arena 1 has 282 rooms, 49 bathrooms, 8 changing rooms and six lifts. During the Olympic and Paralympic Games it will host events for up to 16,000 spectators. The foundation is made of 710 piles and the 18 roof trusses over 26 pillars, and extending across distances of up to 100 meters. Around 2,000 workers took part in the construction.

The 608m2court was built using two different kinds of wood – one for the field of play and the other for the surrounding area. There’s a flexible sustaining system made of rubber cushioning to ensure the athletes’ best performance. The accessibility project includes ramps with direct access to/from the Olympic Way, apart from four external staircases. The bathrooms are adapted for short statured people and people with low mobility. There are also exclusive bathrooms and changing rooms for the disabled population, with emergency buttons, visual and sound signals. There are accessible seating at the bleachers and the staircases have slip-resistant flooring and high-contrast tape.

After the event, the Carioca Arena 1 will benefit athletes and the city’s population. As per the Legacy Project developed by the City Hall, the venue will be dedicated to the sports but also to the promotion of events such as concerts, trade shows, exhibits and sport competitions. Its high performance wing will be located on the space contiguous with Carioca Arena 2, forming a training area for the best boxing, taekwondo and fencing athletes in the country. There will be changing rooms and a gym fully equipped with lift weighting and cardio training apparatus. Part of the bleachers will be dismantled after the Games, leaving 7,500 permanent seats that can be increased by the addition of temporary structures if necessary.

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