Starting in April, around one million free tickets for the 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympics will be handed out to local young people, amateur athletes, people with disabilities and others in a bid to broaden access to the Games. It comes after criticism that tickets on sale to the public were beyond most budgets.
The free tickets will be shared between the neighbourhoods and cities across France that are hosting Olympic events, according to the organising committee Cojop.
They are destined for people with disabilities, people in economic difficulty, young people and students, those practicing or working in sports, and residents in areas directly affected by the mega event.
Of around a million tickets, Cojop said, 100,000 were donated by organisers and others were purchased by the national government and local authorities.
In Seine-Saint-Denis, a densely populated department north of Paris that is hosting four of the Games' big venues as well as the athletes' village, nearly 180,000 tickets are up for grabs: 150,000 for the sporting events and 28,000 for the opening ceremony.
"We've chosen sports that appeal specifically to our audience," said Mathieu Hanotin, mayor of Saint-Denis. The town is home to the Stade de France, the national stadium that will host athletics this summer.
As well as tickets for basketball, football, table tennis and trampolining, some lucky locals will also get their hands on free spots at the men's 100m final – currently on sale for between 195 and 990 euros.
Prize draw
Further afield, the cities of Lyon, Nantes and Saint-Etienne – all hosting Olympic football matches – as well as sailing venue Marseille have a smaller number of free tickets available.
Each local authority will decide how to distribute its tickets, and to whom.
The greater Paris region, Île-de-France, has already opened a prize draw for 30,000 of its 50,000 places on its official app for 15- to 25-year-olds, and is inviting high schools to apply for the rest.
In Saint-Denis and neighbouring towns, meanwhile, priority will be given to locals involved in amateur sport – along with residents affected by construction work or traffic restrictions.
Around 20,000 tickets will be reserved for them, according to Hanotin.
"Not everyone will be able to go to the stadium," he told a press conference last week, "but we want those who are most affected to be able to take part in the Olympic and Paralympic Games."
Games for all?
Organisers have been accused of falling short on their original promise to make Paris 2024 accessible to all, amid complaints about eye-watering ticket prices.
Around 10 percent of tickets were priced at 24 euros, organisers have insisted, while half cost less than 50 euros. They say only 10 percent are on sale for 200 euros or more, and 5 percent for 400 euros and up.
Cojop is counting on profits from ticketing and hospitality to bring in around a third of the amount it has budgeted the cost of organising the Games, which it is aiming to cover almost entirely through revenues generated.
The French government said it had bought 400,000 of the tickets that are being donated to members of the public. More than half of those are earmarked for young people, with smaller numbers going to volunteers, people with disabilities and public employees.
