There are still two years before enjoying Paris 2024, yet we already know a lot about what will happen in the French capital. If you want to impress at a fancy dinner when someone asks about the next Olympic Games, check out IOC’s list of 24 things we already know about Paris 2024.

1 – The Olympic Games Paris 2024 will officially be held from 26 July until 11 August 2024, while the Paralympic Games will take place from 28 August until 8 September. 

2 – The Olympic competitions for football and rugby at Paris 2024 will begin on 24 July, two days before the Opening Ceremony.

3 – The Olympic Games Paris 2024 take place exactly 100 years since Paris hosted the Olympics back in 1924.

4 – Paris will join London as the only city to host the Olympics three times. The Games were in Paris in 1900, 1924 and now in 2024, while London hosted the Games in 1908, 1948 and 2012.

5 – On 26 July 2024, the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris will be held almost exactly 100 years after the 1924 Closing Ceremony, which was held on 27 July.

6 – The Paris 2024 Opening Ceremony will not be held in a stadium for the first time ever. Instead, it will be done on the Seine, the river that crosses the centre of Paris.

7 – There will be 32 sports played during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games and 329 medal events in total.

8 – The sport with the most medals being awarded at Paris 2024 will be aquatics with 49 events across the disciplines of swimming, marathon swimming, diving, water polo, and artistic swimming. Athletics follows closely with 48.

9 – There should be about 10 500 athletes present at the Olympic Games Paris 2024. The final number of competitors will be confirmed following the conclusion of the Olympic Qualifier Series.

10 – There will be one new sport for the Paris 2024 edition of the Olympics: breaking. Competition in the dance sport will comprise two events – one for men and one for women – where 16 B-Boys and 16 B-Girls will go face to face in solo battles.

11 – Approximately 45 000 volunteers will help at the Paris 2024 Games.

12 – There will be a total of 35 Olympic venues at Paris 2024, with fourteen sites hosting 24 Olympic sports located within 10km of the Olympic Village.

13 – Some Olympic events will happen in iconic places of Paris: beach volleyball will be held at the Champ de Mars (under the Eiffel Tower), urban sports will be held at La Concorde, fencing and taekwondo at the Grand Palais, the start of the Marathon at the Hotel de Ville.

14 – The Paris 2024 Games will not only take place in France’s capital, as the football tournament will be played in Bordeaux, Nantes, Lyon, Saint-Etienne, Nice and Marseille, sailing will be in Marseille, while Lille will also have team sports.

15 – For the first time ever, the 2024 Games will also take place in the French territory of Tahiti, where the surfing competition will be held on the Pacific island’s legendary Teahupoo wave, located about 15 000km from Paris.

16 – In canoe, there will be a new event introduced at Paris 2024: Extreme slalom. Four athletes tip off a ramp at the same time and whoever gets to the bottom of the course first is the winner. There will be one event for men and one event for women.

17 – In sailing, there will be a change with 2 new categories at Paris 2024: IQFoil (windsurfing) and formula kite, commonly known as Kite surf.

18 – Three new mixed events will be introduced at Paris 2024: the 35km walking mixed relay of athletics, the skeet mixed team event in shooting and the mixed Dinghy in Sailing.

19 – The Olympic Games will be back in France for the first time in 32 years when Paris 2024 begins, the first Olympics in the country since the Winter Games 1992 in Albertville.

20 – Sport climbing, which was introduced at Tokyo 2020 in 2021, will change its format. In Japan, there was one medal in each gender, which was awarded to the winner of a combined event that saw all athletes compete in speed, bouldering, and lead climbing. At Paris 2024 we will have two different medal events for each gender: a combined event which includes only bouldering and lead, and a separate speed climbing event.

21 – Modern Pentathlon will change its format to last 90 minutes sharp. It will begin with riding, followed by the fencing bonus round and swimming, before closing with the laser run combining shooting and running – with breaks of between five and 15 minutes in between each discipline.

22 – Close to 10 million tickets will go on sale for the Paris 2024 Olympics with around 3.4 million for the Paralympics – all sold via a single website. 

23 – Ticket prices for all Olympic sports in Paris 2024 will start at €24, and the lowest prices for all Paralympic sports will be €15. 

24 – Paris 2024 will include an IOC Refugee Olympic Team. The first refugee team took part in the Rio 2016 Games.

NEW PRESS CENTER

LAUSANNE, July 29, 2022 – According to Paris 2024 International Communication and PR department; the new ‘Palais des Congrès’ building at Porte Maillot (Paris XVII) will replace the initial site located at the Parc des Expositions du Bourget (Seine-Saint-Denis), as the Main Press Centre during Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

This change came out of the Organising Committee’s wish to reduce the cost and time required to build and assemble temporary facilities by using instead an existing infrastructure and venue.

The International Broadcast Centre – IBC (Centre International de Radio Télédiffusion, or CIRTV in French), which will welcome around 15,000 Olympic Broadcasting Services and official broadcasters, including reporters and technical teams, has been confirmed to be situated at the Parc des Expositions – Paris – Le Bourget (Seine-Saint-Denis) during Paris 2024. According to L’Équipe.

This shift will ensure that the media, journalists and photographers, will be a stone’s throw away from the Olympic lanes and public transport networks enabling access to the various competition sites, Paris 2024 claimed. The IOC and IPC will officially validate the relocation by autumn.

FOOTBALL

LAUSANNE, July 29, 2022 – The match schedules for the men’s and women’s Olympic Football Tournaments at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games have been confirmed – and for the first time in the tournaments’ history, the competitions conclude with the final of the women’s competition. The tournaments, which include 12 and 16 nations competing in the women’s and men’s competitions respectively, begin on Wednesday 24 July and conclude at the Parc des Princes on Saturday 10 August 2024.

At Paris 2024, the women’s competition will for the first time ever close the Olympic Football tournaments on Saturday 10 August 2024, with the men’s gold match taking place the day before on Friday 9 August. In another first for the women’s Olympic Football tournament, in 2024 there will also be no double-headers, with every game being a standalone fixture in its own right.

FIFA President and IOC member, Gianni Infantino, said: “FIFA is today very happy to reveal the Olympic Football Tournament match schedules for what will be a truly fantastic summer Games in just two years’ time. We are especially delighted to announce that the Final of the women’s Olympic Football Tournament will, for the first time, close the competition, with every game up to that being a standalone attraction in itself.”

“That this should take place in France is particularly exciting. A country with a distinguished history of developing and excelling in both men’s and women’s football, which has hosted some of the most iconic FIFA tournaments in history, including the last FIFA Women’s World Cup in 2019, and where FIFA has recently re-opened an office to better serve its 211 Member Associations. We look forward to Paris 2024 immensely.”

The schedules confirmed that in addition to the 11 games scheduled to take place in Paris, the residents of six other cities throughout France – Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille, Nantes, Nice and Saint-Etienne – will also get their chance to witness Olympic football. As hosts, France will open their men’s Olympic Football tournament at 2100 CEST on 24 July in Marseille, while the women’s team will kick off at 2100 CEST on 25 July in Lyon – the same stadium which hosted both semi-finals and final of the FIFA Women’s World Cup France 2019.

The finals will both take place in Paris, whilst the bronze medal matches will take place in Nantes and Lyon for men’s and women’s respectively. The semi-finals will be in Lyon and Marseille with each city hosting two semi-finals each – one women’s and one men’s. Qualification for both men’s and women’s Olympic Football Tournaments is already underway around the world. For all the latest news and updates on qualifications for the men’s and women’s Olympic Football Tournament, please visit FIFA+.