A dune occupies the asphalt at the entrance to the Marville departmental sports park in La Courneuve (Seine-Saint-Denis). Four teenagers in the 9th grade are setting off to conquer it this Wednesday afternoon. “We’re climbing Everest,” breathes Yacine, wearing an Algerian football team jersey on his shoulders, between two more or less controlled slides.
These billions of grains, deposited during the day by a dozen trucks, come from the Eiffel Tower stadium in Paris, the stronghold of beach volleyball events during the Olympic Games. During the Paralympic Games, this sand remained in place, at the feet of the Iron Lady, covered by the synthetic turf of the blind football field.
With the dismantling of the Parisian site, it is time for the reconversion (and donations) of materials. The owner of the Marville sports park, the Seine-Saint-Denis departmental council, has thus inherited a good part of the cargo of sand from Paris 2024. The other part, delivered on Tuesday, is returning to the Taverny volleyball club (Val-d’Oise) in order to create a regulation beach volleyball court there.
In Seine-Saint-Denis, the departmental park will receive a total of 690 tonnes of grain originally extracted from a quarry in Aisne. Dump trucks are still to unload some this Thursday morning. This high-quality sand will replace that of three beach volleyball courts intended for, among others, schools.
“It’s great to end up here,” says an employee of the public works company Normandie Drainage, which designed the beach volleyball court at the Eiffel Tower stadium. “It’s a source of pride for us to have sand used by Olympic stars,” enthuses Yacine and his gang, who are more interested in the crampons and the goals than the net smashes.
This huge multi-sports complex is one of the major beneficiaries of the material legacy of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, since the event also allowed the construction of the Annette-Kellermann aquatic center. A training site for the water polo teams during the competition, it has been transformed into a swimming pool open to the general public.
