15,000 Seat Temporary Venue for Paris Olympics Falls in Line With Past Games

Correction: There was some initial confusion, but the permanent 5,000 seat swimming venue being built will host artistic swimming, diving, and some water polo competition, while Paris 2024 will also build a 15,000 seat temporary venue to host the pool swimming and other water polo competition. The article below has been updated to reflect this correction.

Renderings for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games Aquatic Centre were released this week.

The facility is one of only 2 new large-scale venues that are being built from scratch for the event as part of the International Olympic Committee’s sustainability initiatives.

The venue, which was originally projected at about 6,000 seats but has now been rendered at 5,000 seats, will host the artistic (synchronized) swimming, diving, and some water polo competition, and is scaled back from the original permanent 15,000 seat facility that was planned in an effort to reduce costs. Now, the 15,000 seat facility will be a temporary one with 3 pools, and will be disassembled after the Games.

The smaller facility will later host the Boccia competition during the Paralympic Games.

The 5,000 seat facility will be scaled back to just 2,500 seats after the Olympic Games. In spite of that reduction in size, it will likely become the focal point of competition in France.

Paris specifically, and France more broadly, doesn’t have a real crowned jewel to its aquatics program in the way that other major European capitals like London and Budapest and soon Madrid do. The venue could see substantial use if the International Swimming League, whose inaugural champions Energy Standard are based out of Paris, continues until the facility is completed.

Maintaining 15,000+ seat swimming venues when there are really only 4 meets every 4 years that draw those kinds of crowds can be prohibitively expensive. That’s part of the reason why the United States has gone to hosting the US Olympic Trials in a basketball arena with a temporary pool laid in it. That can be a challenge for a huge multi-sport event like the Olympics, where most of the large-scale indoor arenas where that strategy could be plausible are occupied by other sports already.

But deconstructing or reducing the capacity of these venues can be expensive as well, especially in a metro like Paris, which has relatively-high labor costs as compared to a place like Rio.

Beijing has been among the most-successful post-Olympic aquatics venues, reporting that it has been breaking even financially for several years in its second life as a public water park and its repurposing as the curling venue for the 2022 Olympics.

Swimming events at the first modern Olympics in Athens were held in the Bay of Zea, specifically because organizers wanted to avoid the cost of building a sport-specific venue. Paris in 1900 swam in the Seine river, swimming with the current. In 1904 in St. Louis the events were held in a lake, and 1908 in London the racing was contained for the first time, held in the White City Stadium – which was the main Olympic stadium.

In 1912 they went back to the wild, being held in Stockholm harbor, and after 1916 was skipped, swimming got its first purpose-built Olympic swimming venue in Antwerp (though nobody seems to know how many spectators it held).

The second time Paris hosted the Olympic Games, in 1924, they had a bigger venue than they will 100 years later in 2024. The Piscine des Tourelles held 8,023 at the time and drew over 51,000 spectators across the Games.

That pool underwent a substantial renovation in 1989 and was reopened as Piscine Georges Vallerey. It now has rather limited seating – suitable for some domestic competition, but nowhere near the scale at which it was originally built.

The following Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 2028 will expand USC’s baseball field from 2,500 to 20,000, temporarily, for the Games. While that will include a fairly substantial cost, the Olympic Games so far have been heralded generally as among the most sustainably-successful Olympics in recent memory, so as part of a total package of venues, that cost is not expected to be overwhelming relative to other Olympic Games.

Below is a look at the history of Olympic venue sizes.

Editor’s Note: There are disagreeing figures in various sources for the capacity of some Olympic venues historically, often without a single definitive source.