Clairefontaine for football, Marcoussis for rugby and now Bellerive-sur-Allier, in the Vichy area, for padel. The French Tennis Federation (FFT) has formalized the upcoming opening, on the edge of the Auvergne town, of its very first National Training Center for this discipline, which continues to attract fans, with 500,000 practitioners in 2023 compared to 186,000 in 2020.
A dozen courts should thus emerge from the ground on the banks of the Allier for the first racket hits in the fall of 2025. Total cost of the work: 12.15 million euros, of which around 10% financed by the FFT .
This project includes the complete renovation of the historic Sporting de Bellerive-sur-Allier tennis site, which had its heyday at the end of the 1970s, thanks in particular to the organization of the Galéa Cup, in which participants participated Yannick Noah and Ivan Lendl. Without forgetting the proximity of Creps, which welcomed, for the Paris Games, around 250 Olympic and Paralympic athletes from around the world and around fifty medalists.
“The accommodation and physical preparation aspects already exist,” explains Frédéric Aguilera, mayor of Vichy and president of the agglomeration. This makes our city a stronghold of national and even international sport with, for example, the American Triathlon Federation which wants to come here more regularly. »
Being part of the dynamic of the development of this popular sport would not be trivial, according to the elected official. Vichy has, according to him, a sporting tradition that has always existed: “Often with such innovative sports,” says Frédéric Aguilera. Today, we see that padel is the sport that is growing on a global scale, for all the competitions that it is developing in the four corners of the planet, with a certain delay from France. The objective of the Federation is to make up for this delay. »
