Macron inaugurated the Saint Denis swimming pool

President Emmanuel Macron inaugurated this Thursday an impressive wooden building shaped like a wave, which will be the home of ornamental jumps, artistic swimming and the preliminary phase of water polo at the Paris Olympic Games.

This building represents the largest sports infrastructure erected by the organizers, who presume that 95% of the project was already completed when Paris was chosen to host the 2024 Olympic Games: “This work is a demonstration of how France fulfils its commitments,” said Macron and invited us to compare it with the economic “deviations” that occurred in previous Games.

The aquatic center cost 188 million euros and is an innovative building, both for its design and for its ecological components. According to its architects, it will have a capacity for 5,000 spectators and will be the largest swimming pool in France, which until now had none of more than a thousand seats. This will allow the country to host the European Swimming Championships in 2026.

Its peculiar profile will be one of the most characteristic of the Games, which will hardly provide new buildings, since it is based on existing ones, starting with the neighboring Saint Denis Stadium, where athletics and rugby will be played for seven.

A 100-meter footbridge over the highway will allow walking between the two centers, which has significantly increased the budget, but Macron specified that it has not been exceeded.

Initially, the racing events were to take place in an ephemeral tent located next to the aquatic center, but they will eventually take place at the Arena de La Defense, the Rugby Stadium of Racing 92, which will have a capacity for 20,000 spectators during the Games.

The aquatic center has a fully modular 70-meter pool that during the Games will be divided into 2, for synchronized swimming and jumping, the only one of its kind in France, whose specialists in the discipline had to go to train in the United Kingdom until now.

In ecological terms, the building is designed to limit energy consumption as much as possible, thanks to its roof of 5,000 square meters of photovoltaic panels and its air conditioning based on biomass and the heat produced by the servers of a data center. In addition, the seats have been built from bottle caps.