2024-09-23 22:42:55
The nerve center of the CAN 2024, the Alassane Ouattara Olympic Stadium in Ebimpé, the largest in Côte d’Ivoire, hosted ten competitive matches, including the opening match and ceremony, and the final which saw the triumph of the national team, the Elephants. This monumental infrastructure, whose construction cost 163 billion CFA francs (around 250 million euros), has been looking for a second life since the end of the competition.
From our correspondent in Abidjan,
Since the Elephants’ coronation, the Ebimpé stadium has become a tourist attraction and almost a place of pilgrimage, with guided tours organized every day. A small group of about twenty visitors follows Siaka Diarrassouba, an agent of the National Sports Office. They like to see the lawn, the locker rooms…,” he reports. A way of reliving the emotions of the CAN 2024 for those who were not lucky enough to attend directly. We come to visit, we want to see what happened, in fact. I see what I saw on TV, says Eunice Lida, who was on an internship outside the Ivory Coast at the beginning of the year. It’s moving, it’s nice. It’s huge and it’s well maintained. »
Creating activities beyond sport
This maintenance has a cost: around half a billion CFA francs per year. But despite its surface area of 60 hectares and its capacity of 60,000 seats, the stadium has not yet hosted a major sporting event since February. In the immediate future, we are trying to bring it to life with local activities, recognizes its director Séraphin Douéhi. With our marketing department, we are working to provide as much information as possible so that citizens can know that we can organize, beyond football and sport, other cultural activities here. If we want to limit ourselves to sport, it is not obvious that the stadium can really live. And so, we must create related activities, whether it is a shopping center, a hotel, a swimming pool… All this will make the infrastructure more attractive, and that is what we are working on. »
Olympic City Project
Because the stadium is at the heart of a large-scale project: a 280-hectare Olympic city, which the authorities hope to begin construction on at the beginning of 2025. The initial work will be financed by the National Sports Office, but the development of the stadium should ultimately be based on a public-private partnership. It is a city that will take into account the infrastructure of all sports disciplines, so that if tomorrow, Ivory Coast is a candidate to organize the Olympic Games, it can be a center for gathering athletes, as we saw at the Paris Games. Accommodation, catering, training center. »
Séraphin Douéhi aims to set up “a South-South partnership” to allow teams from African countries without approved infrastructure to play at the Ebimpé stadium. In October, he will host the teams from Burundi and Burkina Faso for the qualifiers for the CAN 2025.
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