The opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games (August 28-September 8) will take place at Place de la Concorde. This proposal was made during an executive meeting of the committee and will be presented to the next board of directors on July 12. During the Olympics, Place de la Concorde will host urban sports events (skateboarding, breakdance, BMX, 3×3 basketball).

For the Paralympic Games ceremony, this emblematic place in Paris will be able to accommodate around 30,000 spectators. The ceremony of the Paralympic Games will therefore take place outside the stadium, like the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games which will take place in an unprecedented way on the Seine. No additional details were revealed Thursday on this ceremony on the Seine, in particular its cost.

Asked about the feasibility of this after the incidents at the Stade de France, which aroused fears in the police community, the interministerial delegate to the Olympic Games, Michel Cadot, recently explained that working groups (town hall, police headquarters, and Île-de-France prefecture) must “return a stage point” for validation at the end of August-beginning of September and have it approved by the end of 2022.

In addition, the Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Cojo) this week garnered its fifth leading sponsor, the Carrefour group, after Orange, EDF, BPCE and Sanofi. The amount of the budget from sponsors is 1.1 billion euros and the Cojo wants to have raised 80% of this sum by the end of the year. In February, he claimed to have already garnered or secured around 715 million euros.

A report from the Cojo’s audit committee must be submitted at the end of June in order to take stock before a budget review scheduled for the end of the year. Between inflation and the contracts being awarded which will make it possible to match planned prices and actual prices, this budget revision promises to be complex. In mid-May, the chairman of the organizing committee, Tony Estanguet, explained that “new risks” weighed on the budget. It is currently 4 billion euros, financed by ticketing, an IOC contribution and sponsors.