CNN
Summary
When Paris last hosted the Summer Olympics 100 years ago, organizers were so keen to bring athletes under the same roof that they built the first-ever Olympic Village.
It was spartan, made up of furnished wood huts, and it was razed shortly after.
The competition is back in the City of Lights a century later, but French officials are doing something completely different this time around. As part of their effort to make Paris 2024 the “most responsible and sustainable games in history,” they’re building something that’s meant to last.
“This village was thought up as a neighborhood, a neighborhood that is going to have a life afterwards,” said Georgina Grenon, the Paris 2024 director of sustainability. “Paris 2024 is renting it for a few months.”
The most scrutinized innovation will likely be the geothermal cooling system, as athletes in Paris could face the same level of sweltering heat and humidity that broiled Tokyo during the Summer Olympics there three years ago.
“Climate change should increasingly be viewed as an existential threat to sport,” Sebastian Coe, the president of World Athletics, said in a report published last week (June 18) examining the heat risks associated with this summer’s games.While the ground floor of some buildings in the Olympic Village are equipped with traditional air conditioning because they will be converted into shops after the Olympics, the athlete apartments will use geothermal cooling instead of air conditioning.
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