The Adidas Arena at the Porte de la Chapelle was inaugurated 200 days before the Paris Olympic Games.

PARIS – In mid-summer, it will host badminton, gymnastics, para-badminton followed by para-weightlifting. The Adidas Arena, built at the Porte de la Chapelle in Paris for the Olympic Games, was inaugurated this Sunday, February 11, 166 days before the opening ceremony. It is his future resident club, Paris Basketball, that takes the cake, welcoming Saint-Quentin on day 23 of the French championship.

The Olympic and Paralympic high months will be followed by several international events (city sports, badminton, etc.) on urban sports from 26 July to 11 August, then from 28 August to 8 September.

From September 15, Paris Basketball, which aims to return the capital to the top of French and European basketball, will play all its home matches there in front of 8,000 spectators. Concerts and shows that can accommodate up to 9,000 people will also be held there.

The arena in which Adidas has its name is 2 million euros per “Intermediate Ability Room” who went missing in Paris according to Emmanuel Grégoire, first deputy of the town hall. Because apart from the Accor Arena in Bercy and its 17,000 seats, Paris has no other large sports hall. Neither the Pierre-de-Coubertin Stadium nor the Halle Georges-Carpentier have more than 4,500 seats.

The Olympic Games were therefore an opportunity to bring these instruments off the field, the only ones built within Paris for this event. For 138 million euros (a third of which was paid for by the Games), the hall, whose interior has a Bercy look, found its place in a working-class district in the north of the capital that is rapidly changing.

“The 18th-century town hall wanted this to remain a working-class neighborhood, no question of gentrification.” Emmanuel Grégoire underlines. In fact, the 26,000 m2 part of the enclosure, whose partly green forecourt is open to the street, is made up of a space (opening early 2025) designed as a place for everyday life (shows, exhibitions, etc.). which opens onto a large terrace.

And two gymnasiums for associations, schools and clubs in this deprived district: urbanization, the site of a tangle of ring roads, the A1 motorway and soon the CDG-Express railway viaduct, it was kept a few years ago. “crack hill”.

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